Can it be true? Did a woman anthropologist actually compare the ceremony at which young Masai girls are genitally mutilated to "a white wedding"?

Yes she did. It's true. The anthropologist's name is (or was) Melissa Llewellyn-Davies MFA. In case you're wondering, the initials do not stand for Master of Fine Arts; they stand for Marxist Feminist Anthropologist. Ms Llewellyn-Davies compared genital mutilation to a white wedding in her chillingly misleading narration for the film Masai Women, a Disappearing World production. You can buy it today from CD Universe for $13.49.

I was reminded of this episode when Ayaan Hirsi Ali passed through Sydney recently. It should be said that on the subject of female genital mutilation, and the cultures where this abhorrent practice is found, her own writing in Infidel and The Caged Virgin is the place to start. The general circumstances in which helpless girls have the labia minora, clitoris, and sometimes more than this inadvertently cut off could not be better described and explained. Moreover, Ms Hirsi Ali also tells us that it is still practiced by Somali and Moroccan immigrants in Europe today.

But it's Ms Llewellyn-Davies we're concerned with here. Her film was made at a time when interviewing indigenous informants was relatively new, and was felt to add authenticity—as it usually does. If the purpose is to honestly elicit information it can be valuable. If on the other hand it is used for political purposes by the film-maker it may add nothing useful whatever. Ms Llewellyn-Davies' purpose in Masai Women is to deliberately misrepresent a cruel and painful tribal custom, so instead of asking the Masai girl herself how she feels about it, she seeks the opinion of a traditionalist Masai woman who is all too keen to draw a confusing veil of romance over the whole thing. Ms Llewellyn-Davies then uses this interview to distract us from the bloody centerpiece of the event.

Mind you, our MFA never speaks of "genital mutilation": this ugly phrase never passes her lips. Instead she talks loftily about "the female circumcision ceremony"—but what on earth is that? For most of us "female circumcision" hovers vaguely between anatomical improbability and oxymoron, and is rather puzzling. Secondly, she uses blandly euphemistic imagery to distance, neutralise, and conceal the gory surgical aspect of the occasion. For a girl, she tells us, clitorodectomy

is her farewell to childhood, and also to her family village because she will leave to be married soon afterwards. The ceremony is thought to transform a giggly girl into a mature and thoughtful woman.

No doubt it does. Most of us would stop giggling. In fact, some of its victims not only stop giggling, they later die or suffer the misery of life-long urinary and vaginal complications. Next we see a young girl being prepared for the operation and a few close-ups of her head being shaved. She looks tense, anxious, bewildered, and on the edge of tears. At this point the cine camera image abruptly stops. The photographic record stops. The live sound stops. Regarding the grim ongoing reality of the event, the screen goes blank. (Is this perhaps what Jean Baudrillard meant by the "extermination of the referent"? Certainly the referent—ie, the "giggly girl"—is not just silenced but eliminated.) After a number of scenes in which she is seen looking confusedly toward the camera, no doubt wondering if these white British film-makers are going to be there all the time, she "bids farewell to childhood" by abruptly disappearing into the darkness of a mud-floored hut.

Ms Llewellyn-Davies now has a problem. If she's honest she will try to convey the reality of what is taking place, and audiences everywhere who have read anything about clitorodectomy and infibulation—audiences today who have been reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali's clear and honest account—will see in the mind's eye a helpless child-victim having her external genitalia cut off with a razor blade, by some fumbling half-blind elder working without anaesthetic in semi-darkness, cutting bloodily this way and that. But that of course would give a most unfortunate impression of Masai culture.

What to do?

Back in the 1960s a New York film producer turned down a depressing movie script with the memorable advice—"look, Joe, you don't get it: I make happy pictures about happy people with happy problems." As a film-maker Ms . Llewellyn-Davies belongs to the same euphoric school. With the girl conveniently out of the way she feels free to construct another reality—one that entirely displaces and replaces the reality suffered by the victim with an imaginary creation of her own. Instead of searing pain and humiliation and helplessness, genital mutilation is presented as a happy problem with a happy victim in a happy culture. Because the girl herself might prove an "unreliable witness", she is of course not allowed to speak—instead our Marxist Feminist Anthropologist consults a Masai woman who's all for it.

"Is the girl happy?" asks the MFA brightly, referring to the girl now under the knife.

"Very happy", the woman replies. "Part of the ritual is to brew mead from sugar and honey. Her father drinks and her mother drinks. They wear charms and they are happy."

It is at this point that a ruminative Ms Lewellyn-Davies vouchsafes that all things considered, when you stop to think about it—as of course academics are wont to do…

"It's a bit like a white wedding."

* * *

But was it like a white wedding for the victim? Was she laughing with joy as she said farewell to childhood? Or did she scream with pain and terror?

Surprisingly, we know the answer to these questions, not from the film itself or from the cold lips of Ms Llewellyn-Davies but from an article by Dr Peter Loizos, an anthropologist, telling us how the film was made. According to his 1993 report on the editing of Masai Women, the girl's agony was in fact recorded on audio tape during filming, and "a lively debate took place in the cutting room later about how the issue should be handled". One view was that "perhaps the girl's screams should be heard, thus giving symbolic expression to what was visually too horrific." The anthropological sensitivity of the editors is touching—though one is bound to wonder what exactly Ms Llewellyn-Davies contributed to the "lively debate" and how she influenced its outcome.

In the film that was finally produced there's no sound whatever of the girl's ordeal. Her screams were edited out and replaced by the voice and image of an older tribal woman smilingly telling us how happy she is, while Ms Llewellyn-Davies—whose bleak British diction has to be heard to be believed—pours a bland sociological interpretation over everything. Those interested in general arguments about truth and lies in documentary film-making are referred to an essay at this site where these matters are discussed at greater length—see "Matters of Fact". For the story of the editing of MasaiWomen see Peter Loizos, Innovation in ethnographic film. University of Chicago Press. (1993)

domingo, 22 de julho de 2007

Professor Mansfield seems a very agreeable man: understanding of women’s problems, erudite and persuasive. Above all, perhaps, patient: excessively so with the academic feminists he aims to convert to some appreciation of manly virtues.This he tries to do by proposing to allocate manliness between the sexes, not quite equally but in part.He concedes that some men are not notable for manliness and that some women are.He believes that manliness has come into disrepute, that society, or at least that part of it which sets fashions, now prefers males to aspire to something called “sensitivity” rather than manliness. He thinks we are now living in what he calls a gender-neutral society, a state brought about by the campaigns of the radical feminists, especially in academia.They managed this, he says, by peaceful means; by 'consciousness-raising', by words rather than violent action.And they were astonishingly successful.Their adversaries caved in all around them and they managed to change practices by changing the language, making any kind of verbal 'sexism'—a word they themselves popularized—unacceptable among decent people. And the new dispensation was achieved with extraordinary rapidity, which Professor Harvey confesses causes him surprise and some puzzlement. He says he is still unable to explain feminists’ easy victory. So easy indeed, that manliness is now deprecated and men feminizedNot that the author calls the process of sensitization by that name.But many others have and there may be some truth in it.

In measured and often witty argument he examines the concept of manliness in all its manifestations, practical and literary, historical and philosophical.No reader willbe surprised at his citing Achilles or John Wayne;most will find the mention of Nietzche less consensual, unless uber-menschism can be construed as manliness.But Professor Harvey readily admits that not all manliness is commendable.However, its core characteristics certainly are and the feminists are mistakento decry it.If only they were to accept society’s (and women’s) need of manliness in men they would lose nothing and strengthen their case.

—«»—

ProfessorMansfield’s ideas in this regard are generally unexceptionable.The trouble lies withthe feminist framework he appears to accept. There are a number of points he might have questioned. First, while academia may be a gender-neutral space, it is doubtful that this is true of society as a whole. Or even desirable. Secondly, the accession of women to full citizenship (something feminists call 'women’s liberation') cannot really be ascribed to the last three or four decades of radical feminist activism.The realization of sexual equality, still uncompleted inmany areas and especially on the domestic front, owed itself to other causes and would have come about regardless of the activities or arguments of people like Greer, Friedan, Butler and their ilk. It can even be arguedthat most women—and society as a whole—might today be better off without the ranting of the radical feminists.

It islikely that the appearanceof these figures in the first place was because new spaces had for a long time been opening up to women and those self-appointedspokeswomen for the female sex simply took advantage of their opportunities. Like the Bolsheviks in 1917 Russia the feminists assaulted a crumbling citadel and captured it with remarkable ease.

Professor Mansfield, however, leaves the premises of radical feminism untouched,. Refuting feminism is not his objective. He does not even talk about the ravages it has caused in terms of sexual harassment legislation, quarrels over quotas and affirmative action, the bitterness of the so-called culture wars, fatherless homes, mounting domestic violence, intellectual and moral obscurantism, the breaking down of civility and the coarsening of manners. What he wants is to put in a plea for men. He does so eloquently and with some elegance. But it is doubtful that he will get a hearing from either side.

Instead of looking to biology, anthropology, history and economics for the sources of women’s subordination, without which it is impossible to find the right solutions, radical feminism has been largely based on the Marxist theory of class war, discredited notions about primitive communism and what Engels called 'the overthrow of mother-right' in those halcyon days when savages were noble and there was no class exploitation.

One of the curious things about this book is that its author, who is a Professor of Government at Harvard, in over 280 pages scarcely mentions economics. What he is concerned with are philosophical ideas. It is as though he had been dazzled by radical feminism’s forays into the dismal labyrinths of post-modernism and had decided that philosophy would be the area in which he was most likely to impress his word-drunk feminist readers.

What follows is not intended to diminish the significance of ideas or their influence in human affairs. Of course, these are immensely important.But Professor Mansfield’s mistake is to forget that ideas only gain influence inan appropriate environment. Ideas which don’t catch on because they are ahead of their time or out of context are quickly forgotten.Plato, in the IVth century BC, had a great deal to say about the role of women in the communist society described in The Republic. And Professor Mansfield gives Plato frequent mention. Before the scientific revolution of the XVIIth century and the Enlightenment of the XVIIIth century, Plato’s social projects could not but remain a dead letter.And althoughwhat came to be known as “the woman question” began to come into the foregroundin the nineteenth century it was not until the twentieth that matters really came to a head.It was the industrial revolution and accelerating technological advance that set the scene for women’s emancipation which could not have taken place without them.

The radical feminists are quite mistaken in their theories about the patriarchy being the source of women’s subordinate status. The unwelcome truth of the matter is that until modern technology could produce efficient means of contraception on the one hand and on the other multiple labour-saving devices, women and children—the human race, in fact—could not survive at all without the protection of the male sex. Radical feminists forget that young humans need their mothers because they have a very long childhood, required for learning language and other exclusively human skills. Men, as the necessary protectors of women, had manliness thrust upon them by Nature and this was reinforced by culture; their reward was honour and the status of leadership in the home and outside it. Some exercised their power magnanimously, others were tyrants. But women could not avoid dependence until technology freed females from annual childbirth and both sexes from back-breaking labour.

It is an extraordinary commentary on the obtuseness (not to say scientific illiteracy) of some female academics that they continue to mythologize patriarchy asan evil imposed from outside of nature, and insist that “gender” is a social construction. Schools may no longer provide adequate teaching of biology or zoology but our television screens and newspaper columns are filled daily with studies of animal behaviour, the courting rituals of alpha males, programmes about genetics and the role of mitrochondrial DNA in heredity, X and Y chromosomes, testosterone and the rest. Everything indicates that the males of mammalian species are hard-wired for masculinity (manliness). During 99.99 per cent of the human and pre-human past men had togo hunting and kill animals for food,and some of the attributes of manliness are associated with this activity—boldness, aggressiveness, stoicism, etc., while associated cultural traditions account for most of the rest. But feminists have preferred to learn from a crackpot male philosopher, Michel Foucault who thought heterosexuality had been imposed on society by the bourgeoisie. They have made him one of their most significant intellectual icons.But this is not really surprising if they are misguided enough to dismiss scienceas a male enterprise: part of phallogocentrism condemned by Foucault..

—«»—

However, rather than persist in beating that dead horse, it is more to the point to mention once again just a few of the many factors that brought about women’s emancipation and in which the radical feminists had no hand at all. It should also be borne in mind that those phenomena which helped to liberatewomen had the inevitable tendency of making many masculine attributes redundant. These phenomena are to be found in the history of transport, production, technology and education.

Take transport.The advent of the motor car at the end of the nineteenth century had far-reaching social repercussions.When the first members of the upper classes bought motor cars and reserved their horses for the hunt, it really was the beginning of the end of chivalry in every sense.It ushered in the possibility of freedom of movement for women as well as men, and with no muscular exertion.Not only couldpeople get from place to place rapidly, safely and dry: chaperones could be dispensed with. In southern Europe where the chaperone was ubiquitous and middle and upper-class women were not allowed to go out alone, a driving licence became a woman’s access to freedom of movement and escape from the home.The Saudi Islamic fundamentalists know what they are doing when they ban women from driving cars.

More or less simultaneous with the appearance on the market of motor-cars was that of the condom.Whether or not the latter was first thought of as a prophylactic its use as a contraceptive soon became widespread and fromthat time onwards the size of families among the educated classes dropped dramatically.The path was opened for separating sex from reproductionand women were set for biological freedom.

Long before the First World War sent droves of women into the factories to replace men who had departed for the armed forces, growing mechanization during the previous century had already lured working women into industry. The sewing machine needed female operatives at home and in the workplace. As capitalism developed so did its concomitant service industries.Inoffices everywhere the typewriter became ubiquitousand with it the female typist.Employers had been quick to see the advantages of lower-paid female labour and there were simply not enough men to fulfil the growing need for clerical workers. Of course, women had never been absent from economic life. Throughout history peasant women had worked long and hard in the fields and villages, even though some of their tasks might have been lighter than those of men.But with the advent of machinery, agriculture needed less and less manpower and the exodus of whole families to the towns provided expandingindustry and commerce with the human beingsneededas producers and consumers.

In truth the long, slow movement towards female emancipation ran parallel with the growth of capitalism.As did education to fill the need for a more educated workforce.None of these needs or their satisfaction grew at an even pace.As usual it was the political sphere that lagged behind and this was the arena where conflicting interests met and policies were hammered out.Hence there were women physicians before there were women members of parliament, women writers before there were women cabinet ministers.Family law was one of the last bastions to give way but now, for good or ill, an entire generation of women has grown up into a world of easy divorce, contraception and abortion.The United Kingdom even got itself a woman prime minister and she was certainly no product of radical feminism. And now all over the developed world there are more women university graduates than men.

Why then the remarkable rancorousness of feminist discourse?Why does even a man as urbane as Professor Mansfield make so much rueful mention of the domestic battle to get husbands to share the housework so that their wives might have careers.Why did Betty Freidan’s unremarkable book The Feminine Mystique have such success that it is now regarded among feminists much as The Communist Manifesto among socialists? The answer is simple: the educated woman’s boredom with housework. A glance at the pace of female emancipation in places like southern Europe, Latin America or India tells it all.Surprising as it might seem it is much easier for an educated woman to combine marriage, motherhood and a career in poorer countries than in rich ones.Where there is still a large peasant populationbut the cities are approaching Western standards, there is no shortage of domestic servants to staff the more spacious southern or non-western homes of professional women and at much lower wages than those of the European or American nanny. Husbands have little to lose from their wives’ pursuit of careers. No doubt thisstate of affairs will not last for ever, but while it does, the middle-class women it benefits will be freer to enter politics than their Anglo sisters. And with notably less friction in the home with their men-folk. All this, of course, is to leave out the special case of Islam, but that is an altogether different story.

Against this backdrop we need to take a further look at Professor Mansfield’s book and his concern with manliness. There canbe little doubt that modern life does indeed threaten traditional ideas of manliness. The multiple social and economic factors which were crucial to the emancipation of women have also been significant in creating a deficit of manliness in men. This is observably so where muscular aspects of manliness are concerned.Who needs muscle when you’ve got machines?Even the horny-handed sons of toil have mostly disappeared to be replaced by clean, neatly overalled technicians.There are, of course, still enclaves where brawn and endurance are needed, and the fork-lift truck and bull-dozer are not always the complete answer.But even extractive industries, abattoirs, or fishing vessels are easier places to work in than they once were.As for the legions of office-workers, where is there scope here for old-style manliness?What scope does exist is on the streets and playing fields where much male aggression stubbornly persists to everybody’s inconvenience.

Much as all normal women appreciate manly men, and normal menprefer womanly women, it really does seem time to get rid of these words, certainly of theiruse asnouns.What we want today is character in both sexes and this is something that western education systems have been remiss in developing.If educators, professors, school-teachers and those who run their institutions, can pull themselves together and set about this task a good many of our troubles would be over.

A Return to Modesty:Discovering the Lost Virtue, Wendy Shalit, The Free Press, New York, 1999.

BOOKS DESCRIBING the negative consequences of the sexual revolution provide dismal reading and provokemounting impatience.Not simply because of the less than edifying facts they recount but because they rarely get to the heart of the matter: they discuss neither causes nor cures other than superficially. After all, if we are to find our way out of the present deplorable mess (and both these books show that it is indeed deplorable), we need to know how we got herein the first place.Melanie Phillips, with the same care with which she built up her case against the education establishment in All Must Have Prizes, provides a catalogue of factors leading to family breakdown.Promotion of single motherhood and a new definition ofthe family unit as consisting of mother and offspring; the exclusion of fathers;policies and propaganda to the effect that male and female are identical; denigration of traditional male (and female) virtues such as responsibility, protectiveness, courage and loyalty; divorce rates of epidemic proportions.

Melanie Phillips documents all of these and adds to them by discussing what she calls the ‘growing crisis among men’, whose sense of identity has been eroded,leading to ‘despair, irresponsibility and violence’.

Wendy Shalit is more anecdotal, impressionistic and to some extent autobiographical.She describes nostalgically the orthodox Jewish approach to conjugal modesty as she learned it from members of her own family.She is damning in her denunciation of a society where: Nowadays, a girl can’t get aspirin from her school nurse without parental permission, but in many states, she can get on the Pill or have an abortion.It is her decision alone.

Shalit speaks for her own generation, the offspring of the baby-boomers, declaring that ‘…sometimes we would prefer not to have learned about AIDS in kindergarten.’She is describing contemporary US society and the truly staggering (by European standards) promiscuity of college students, for whom old-fashioned dating seems to havebeenreplaced by indiscriminate and instant copulation.Ifthe account she gives is not exaggerated one wonders when these young people find time or energy to study.

Melanie Phillips is mainly concerned with British society and especially with the misconceived legislation which has now got to the point of creating fiscal disincentives to marriage.Her book is so packed with facts and figures that it is a pity the lack of an index makes it less useful than it should be.She ends her indictment with a concluding chapter proposing ‘ A Policy for all the Family’.

Consequences of Gender feminist ideology

Shalit, whose book is, by contrast, almost excessively documented and indexed, makes various constructive proposalsand concludes by asking for a new sexual revolution.She thinks that many of her contemporaries are unhappy with the present state of affairs and that this accounts for the popularity of period romance on TV and in films.Phillips depicts British ruling circles as being concerned about the breakdown of the family as a cause of disorder and the development of the ‘lad culture’ but she sees government as condemned to adoption of incoherent and counterproductive policies because of the proliferation within its ranks of gender feminists.

There can be little doubt that each of these writers has valid arguments andtheir contributions to an ever-growing critical bibliography in this area are to be welcomed.However, neither nostalgia for a largely mythical past nor denunciation of the lunacies of the gender feminists will do much to change things. After all, the disappearance of modesty, reticence and ordinary decency in relations between the sexes is part of a general deterioration in manners.Acertain modicum of formality, of ritual and of hierarchy is essential for the preservation of social order, as chimps and other social animals know instinctively.For individuals to flourish within a collective there must be a recognized and respected space allowed to them.It is surely not coincidental that bad manners and bad moralsseem to go hand in hand with the growth of over-familiarity, contempt for ritual and disregard for promises given.

The three essential facts of human life, birth, marriage and death, have all been vitally affected by the advance of technology and the increasing modernization of society. Birth is regulated by contraception and abortion instead of the traditional means of abstinence. Death has been almost eliminated from child-birth for both mother and child. Infant mortality is now rare and life expectancy far exceeds the biblical span. Death itself has been evicted from the home and takes place in the near-secrecy of the hospital ward and in the presemce pf professional 'careers' rather than the family.

All this, of course, is very ‘eurocentric’. We only have to watch the news on TV on any night of the week to see that death in every shape and form is the everyday experience of half the world’s population.However, it is the world of Anglo-American and European civilization we are concerned with, and whether modernization will bring the same ills as ours to the ‘developing’ world neednot for the moment trouble us.What is our concern is that the banishment of death from the home and the proliferation of material comfort have brought about momentous changes in outlook and behaviour.Among them are the cult of equality and informality and increasing reluctance to discuss serious matters seriously, and so increasing impatience with ritual. Ritual is the way all societies attempt to inculcate in their members an awareness of the seriousness ofhappenings and occasions.As Dr Johnson pointed out with regard to the prospect of hanging, it concentrates the mind wonderfully to be faced with death.Ritual has the same function. In a society in which death is invisible and ritual trivialized, we can scarcely expect seriousness to be widespread.

The trouble, however,is that there is no going back.Nostalgia may be a pleasant self-indulgence but it is scarcely useful.Nobody wants to return to the world of suffering before the alleviations provided by modern medicine and modern comforts. Even the sincere practising Catholic is unlikely to follow the Pope’s ukases on birth control. No politician would get very far if he proposed returning to legislation that woulduphold the indissolubility of marriage. Nor would most people relish going back to the extremes of social formality, scarcely practical anyway in industrial society. And so we might continue with the long catalogue ofchanges that have brought us to the present pass.

So what is to be done?

The question must be put seriously for if nothing is done decadence will certainly have its course.Our cities will become increasingly disordered and dangerous;a helot class of uneducable and unemployable will grow;civilization itself will be endangered.Now that the Cold War is overand communism conspiracies can no longer be blamed we need to ask ourselves what interests in our own societies stand to benefit.We really do need to identify and name those capitalist interests benefited by disorder.A market economy must not be confused with a black market economy.We also need to take a long, hard look at old customs and institutions and see whether it isn’t reform they need rather than abolition.Melanie Phillips thinks that many British politicians would like to abolish marriage.But there is something else you could do to restore its dignity.What about making divorceextremely difficult for couples with children and easier still for everyone else? Or even irrevocable 20-year marriage contracts, with an option to renew,rather than ‘till death do us part’?This would end once and for all the present appalling get-rich-quick divorce scams some women manage.Andpeople might find sacrificing themselves for the sake of the children a reasonable proposition if there were light at the end of the tunnel.

Such proposals as this may shock good conservatives.But isn’t the present state of affairs even more shocking?If the nuclear family of man, wife and children is to be saved and the nanny-State defeated, there need to be innovation together withthe imagination to conceive it and the will to implement it.

* Salisbury Review, London, Spring 2000

HUMPTY DUMPTY'S PROBLEM*

By Patricia Lança

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.All the King’s horses and all the King’s menCouldn’t put Humpty together again.

A Return to Modesty:Discovering the Lost Virtue, Wendy Shalit, The Free Press, New York, 1999.

BOOKS DESCRIBING the negative consequences of the sexual revolution provide dismal reading and provokemounting impatience.Not simply because of the less than edifying facts they recount but because they rarely get to the heart of the matter: they discuss neither causes nor cures other than superficially. After all, if we are to find our way out of the present deplorable mess (and both these books show that it is indeed deplorable), we need to know how we got herein the first place.Melanie Phillips, with the same care with which she built up her case against the education establishment in All Must Have Prizes, provides a catalogue of factors leading to family breakdown.Promotion of single motherhood and a new definition ofthe family unit as consisting of mother and offspring; the exclusion of fathers;policies and propaganda to the effect that male and female are identical; denigration of traditional male (and female) virtues such as responsibility, protectiveness, courage and loyalty; divorce rates of epidemic proportions.

Melanie Phillips documents all of these and adds to them by discussing what she calls the ‘growing crisis among men’, whose sense of identity has been eroded,leading to ‘despair, irresponsibility and violence’.

Wendy Shalit is more anecdotal, impressionistic and to some extent autobiographical.She describes nostalgically the orthodox Jewish approach to conjugal modesty as she learned it from members of her own family.She is damning in her denunciation of a society where: Nowadays, a girl can’t get aspirin from her school nurse without parental permission, but in many states, she can get on the Pill or have an abortion.It is her decision alone.

Shalit speaks for her own generation, the offspring of the baby-boomers, declaring that ‘…sometimes we would prefer not to have learned about AIDS in kindergarten.’She is describing contemporary US society and the truly staggering (by European standards) promiscuity of college students, for whom old-fashioned dating seems to havebeenreplaced by indiscriminate and instant copulation.Ifthe account she gives is not exaggerated one wonders when these young people find time or energy to study.

Melanie Phillips is mainly concerned with British society and especially with the misconceived legislation which has now got to the point of creating fiscal disincentives to marriage.Her book is so packed with facts and figures that it is a pity the lack of an index makes it less useful than it should be.She ends her indictment with a concluding chapter proposing ‘ A Policy for all the Family’.

Consequences of Gender feminist ideology

Shalit, whose book is, by contrast, almost excessively documented and indexed, makes various constructive proposalsand concludes by asking for a new sexual revolution.She thinks that many of her contemporaries are unhappy with the present state of affairs and that this accounts for the popularity of period romance on TV and in films.Phillips depicts British ruling circles as being concerned about the breakdown of the family as a cause of disorder and the development of the ‘lad culture’ but she sees government as condemned to adoption of incoherent and counterproductive policies because of the proliferation within its ranks of gender feminists.

There can be little doubt that each of these writers has valid arguments andtheir contributions to an ever-growing critical bibliography in this area are to be welcomed.However, neither nostalgia for a largely mythical past nor denunciation of the lunacies of the gender feminists will do much to change things. After all, the disappearance of modesty, reticence and ordinary decency in relations between the sexes is part of a general deterioration in manners.Acertain modicum of formality, of ritual and of hierarchy is essential for the preservation of social order, as chimps and other social animals know instinctively.For individuals to flourish within a collective there must be a recognized and respected space allowed to them.It is surely not coincidental that bad manners and bad moralsseem to go hand in hand with the growth of over-familiarity, contempt for ritual and disregard for promises given.

The three essential facts of human life, birth, marriage and death, have all been vitally affected by the advance of technology and the increasing modernization of society. Birth is regulated by contraception and abortion instead of the traditional means of abstinence. Death has been almost eliminated from child-birth for both mother and child. Infant mortality is now rare and life expectancy far exceeds the biblical span. Death itself has been evicted from the home and takes place in the near-secrecy of the hospital ward and in the presemce pf professional 'careers' rather than the family.

All this, of course, is very ‘eurocentric’. We only have to watch the news on TV on any night of the week to see that death in every shape and form is the everyday experience of half the world’s population.However, it is the world of Anglo-American and European civilization we are concerned with, and whether modernization will bring the same ills as ours to the ‘developing’ world neednot for the moment trouble us.What is our concern is that the banishment of death from the home and the proliferation of material comfort have brought about momentous changes in outlook and behaviour.Among them are the cult of equality and informality and increasing reluctance to discuss serious matters seriously, and so increasing impatience with ritual. Ritual is the way all societies attempt to inculcate in their members an awareness of the seriousness ofhappenings and occasions.As Dr Johnson pointed out with regard to the prospect of hanging, it concentrates the mind wonderfully to be faced with death.Ritual has the same function. In a society in which death is invisible and ritual trivialized, we can scarcely expect seriousness to be widespread.

The trouble, however,is that there is no going back.Nostalgia may be a pleasant self-indulgence but it is scarcely useful.Nobody wants to return to the world of suffering before the alleviations provided by modern medicine and modern comforts. Even the sincere practising Catholic is unlikely to follow the Pope’s ukases on birth control. No politician would get very far if he proposed returning to legislation that woulduphold the indissolubility of marriage. Nor would most people relish going back to the extremes of social formality, scarcely practical anyway in industrial society. And so we might continue with the long catalogue ofchanges that have brought us to the present pass.

So what is to be done?

The question must be put seriously for if nothing is done decadence will certainly have its course.Our cities will become increasingly disordered and dangerous;a helot class of uneducable and unemployable will grow;civilization itself will be endangered.Now that the Cold War is overand communism conspiracies can no longer be blamed we need to ask ourselves what interests in our own societies stand to benefit.We really do need to identify and name those capitalist interests benefited by disorder.A market economy must not be confused with a black market economy.We also need to take a long, hard look at old customs and institutions and see whether it isn’t reform they need rather than abolition.Melanie Phillips thinks that many British politicians would like to abolish marriage.But there is something else you could do to restore its dignity.What about making divorceextremely difficult for couples with children and easier still for everyone else? Or even irrevocable 20-year marriage contracts, with an option to renew,rather than ‘till death do us part’?This would end once and for all the present appalling get-rich-quick divorce scams some women manage.Andpeople might find sacrificing themselves for the sake of the children a reasonable proposition if there were light at the end of the tunnel.

Such proposals as this may shock good conservatives.But isn’t the present state of affairs even more shocking?If the nuclear family of man, wife and children is to be saved and the nanny-State defeated, there need to be innovation together withthe imagination to conceive it and the will to implement it.

* Salisbury Review, London, Spring 2000

HUMPTY DUMPTY'S PROBLEM*

By Patricia Lança

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.All the King’s horses and all the King’s menCouldn’t put Humpty together again.

A Return to Modesty:Discovering the Lost Virtue, Wendy Shalit, The Free Press, New York, 1999.

BOOKS DESCRIBING the negative consequences of the sexual revolution provide dismal reading and provokemounting impatience.Not simply because of the less than edifying facts they recount but because they rarely get to the heart of the matter: they discuss neither causes nor cures other than superficially. After all, if we are to find our way out of the present deplorable mess (and both these books show that it is indeed deplorable), we need to know how we got herein the first place.Melanie Phillips, with the same care with which she built up her case against the education establishment in All Must Have Prizes, provides a catalogue of factors leading to family breakdown.Promotion of single motherhood and a new definition ofthe family unit as consisting of mother and offspring; the exclusion of fathers;policies and propaganda to the effect that male and female are identical; denigration of traditional male (and female) virtues such as responsibility, protectiveness, courage and loyalty; divorce rates of epidemic proportions.

Melanie Phillips documents all of these and adds to them by discussing what she calls the ‘growing crisis among men’, whose sense of identity has been eroded,leading to ‘despair, irresponsibility and violence’.

Wendy Shalit is more anecdotal, impressionistic and to some extent autobiographical.She describes nostalgically the orthodox Jewish approach to conjugal modesty as she learned it from members of her own family.She is damning in her denunciation of a society where: Nowadays, a girl can’t get aspirin from her school nurse without parental permission, but in many states, she can get on the Pill or have an abortion.It is her decision alone.

Shalit speaks for her own generation, the offspring of the baby-boomers, declaring that ‘…sometimes we would prefer not to have learned about AIDS in kindergarten.’She is describing contemporary US society and the truly staggering (by European standards) promiscuity of college students, for whom old-fashioned dating seems to havebeenreplaced by indiscriminate and instant copulation.Ifthe account she gives is not exaggerated one wonders when these young people find time or energy to study.

Melanie Phillips is mainly concerned with British society and especially with the misconceived legislation which has now got to the point of creating fiscal disincentives to marriage.Her book is so packed with facts and figures that it is a pity the lack of an index makes it less useful than it should be.She ends her indictment with a concluding chapter proposing ‘ A Policy for all the Family’.

Consequences of Gender feminist ideology

Shalit, whose book is, by contrast, almost excessively documented and indexed, makes various constructive proposalsand concludes by asking for a new sexual revolution.She thinks that many of her contemporaries are unhappy with the present state of affairs and that this accounts for the popularity of period romance on TV and in films.Phillips depicts British ruling circles as being concerned about the breakdown of the family as a cause of disorder and the development of the ‘lad culture’ but she sees government as condemned to adoption of incoherent and counterproductive policies because of the proliferation within its ranks of gender feminists.

There can be little doubt that each of these writers has valid arguments andtheir contributions to an ever-growing critical bibliography in this area are to be welcomed.However, neither nostalgia for a largely mythical past nor denunciation of the lunacies of the gender feminists will do much to change things. After all, the disappearance of modesty, reticence and ordinary decency in relations between the sexes is part of a general deterioration in manners.Acertain modicum of formality, of ritual and of hierarchy is essential for the preservation of social order, as chimps and other social animals know instinctively.For individuals to flourish within a collective there must be a recognized and respected space allowed to them.It is surely not coincidental that bad manners and bad moralsseem to go hand in hand with the growth of over-familiarity, contempt for ritual and disregard for promises given.

The three essential facts of human life, birth, marriage and death, have all been vitally affected by the advance of technology and the increasing modernization of society. Birth is regulated by contraception and abortion instead of the traditional means of abstinence. Death has been almost eliminated from child-birth for both mother and child. Infant mortality is now rare and life expectancy far exceeds the biblical span. Death itself has been evicted from the home and takes place in the near-secrecy of the hospital ward and in the presemce pf professional 'careers' rather than the family.

All this, of course, is very ‘eurocentric’. We only have to watch the news on TV on any night of the week to see that death in every shape and form is the everyday experience of half the world’s population.However, it is the world of Anglo-American and European civilization we are concerned with, and whether modernization will bring the same ills as ours to the ‘developing’ world neednot for the moment trouble us.What is our concern is that the banishment of death from the home and the proliferation of material comfort have brought about momentous changes in outlook and behaviour.Among them are the cult of equality and informality and increasing reluctance to discuss serious matters seriously, and so increasing impatience with ritual. Ritual is the way all societies attempt to inculcate in their members an awareness of the seriousness ofhappenings and occasions.As Dr Johnson pointed out with regard to the prospect of hanging, it concentrates the mind wonderfully to be faced with death.Ritual has the same function. In a society in which death is invisible and ritual trivialized, we can scarcely expect seriousness to be widespread.

The trouble, however,is that there is no going back.Nostalgia may be a pleasant self-indulgence but it is scarcely useful.Nobody wants to return to the world of suffering before the alleviations provided by modern medicine and modern comforts. Even the sincere practising Catholic is unlikely to follow the Pope’s ukases on birth control. No politician would get very far if he proposed returning to legislation that woulduphold the indissolubility of marriage. Nor would most people relish going back to the extremes of social formality, scarcely practical anyway in industrial society. And so we might continue with the long catalogue ofchanges that have brought us to the present pass.

So what is to be done?

The question must be put seriously for if nothing is done decadence will certainly have its course.Our cities will become increasingly disordered and dangerous;a helot class of uneducable and unemployable will grow;civilization itself will be endangered.Now that the Cold War is overand communism conspiracies can no longer be blamed we need to ask ourselves what interests in our own societies stand to benefit.We really do need to identify and name those capitalist interests benefited by disorder.A market economy must not be confused with a black market economy.We also need to take a long, hard look at old customs and institutions and see whether it isn’t reform they need rather than abolition.Melanie Phillips thinks that many British politicians would like to abolish marriage.But there is something else you could do to restore its dignity.What about making divorceextremely difficult for couples with children and easier still for everyone else? Or even irrevocable 20-year marriage contracts, with an option to renew,rather than ‘till death do us part’?This would end once and for all the present appalling get-rich-quick divorce scams some women manage.Andpeople might find sacrificing themselves for the sake of the children a reasonable proposition if there were light at the end of the tunnel.

Such proposals as this may shock good conservatives.But isn’t the present state of affairs even more shocking?If the nuclear family of man, wife and children is to be saved and the nanny-State defeated, there need to be innovation together withthe imagination to conceive it and the will to implement it.

In no otherarea have traditional ideas been so challenged in recent years as in that of the relationship between the sexes and the way men and women see themselves and each other. In western universities and the forums of some international organizations a paradigm as old as the human species is being questioned and strange new patterns adumbrated. Never before have these subjects been so much discussed, studied, written up, campaigned about and legislated on as in the last three decades. Until very recently sexual identity and a broad typology of character for men on the one hand and women on the other have been thought to be fixed and unalterable.How sexual identity defined a person was seen as of a quite different order from other defining characteristics of human beings such as class, religion, nationality and ethnicity.And so it still is—except by proponents of what are known as ‘gender theory’ and its close relative, ‘queer theory’.

The apparent immutability of sexual identity is still the rule for the vast majority of human-kind and it is doubtful whether even in modern societies most people are likelyto have had their fundamental perceptions changed by such theories.The fact that women have risen in recent years to high positions in the State has very little to do with the matter. History is, after all, peppered with female figures who have exercised real power and this has never been a factor in changing perceptions aboutthe respective vocations and nature of ordinary men and women.What has indeed been changing is the attitude of members of both sexes to the participation of women in economic and public life.

Despite women’s emancipation in the industrialized countries, the majority of people still seem to have little doubtthat most men will become fathers and most women mothers and that children are best raised in families. Or the corollary that mothers are women and fathers are men. There is, however, growing public concern over some recent social trends, most evident in the English-speaking world and Scandinavian countries, which seem to indicate increasing family breakdown. Working wives and mothers, full citizenship rights for women, easy divorce and abortion and a growing number of women in leading positions in public and private administration have certainly had familial and wider social repercussions.It is therefore appropriate to examine the position of‘gender theorists’ in relation tothese questions.

It might be useful first to look at sexual identity and character in three phases: before women’s emancipation; secondly, during that process; and thirdly the situation as it exists today. Thisexamination requires to be undertaken in a spirit of realism rather than with a mind-set bent on seeking evidence of class oppression and the allegedpredisposition of men to dominate and exploit women. What follows is necessarily schematic and concerned rather with the lives of ordinary people than with the particularities in habit and outlook of tiny élites.

The sexes before modernization

Before the onset of modernization it was impossible for women to be other than dependent upon men. This fact requires brief elaboration because its implications are overlooked, denied or misinterpreted by ‘gender theory’ whose tenets are notable for lack of empathy with the main features of human history and of compassion for its essentially tragic content.

In traditional agrarian societies average life-expectancy was around forty years, about half what it is today. High mortality meant that a high birth rate was essential for a community’s survival, hence large families were very desirable.Most females were expected to marry as soon as they reached puberty and, if they were reasonably healthy and their husbands were not absent from home, the natural course was for women to conceive and give birth almost every year.Access to and knowledge of birth-control was unsought and therefore almost unknown.All but rich women, who could afford wet nurses, had to breast-feed their babies. Human beings of both sexestoiled from dawn to dusk in order to keep alive. Nearly everybody, includingmembers of ruling castes, was illiterate.Only a fewbelonged to the class of clerics and literati who could cultivate things of the mind.There was scant leisure for the masses. Public order and security in face of marauders and the elements were fragile.In such circumstances the very survival of humanity meant that women and children required protection. This requirement has been sacralized by religion and enshrined in law. It is here that we must seek the origin of the family and not in what Engels called ‘the overthrow of mother-right’ and ‘…the first class oppression… of the female sex by the male.’1

Of course women suffered from the necessarily subordinate position that dependence implies.But men suffered too.They frequently had to sacrifice life and limb in defence of their homes and families. Their incentive and reward were the honour and glory associated with the valour demanded of the ‘stronger sex’.Women brought up their sons in the cult of courage and duty to the family.It can well be argued that as the first educators and socializers of children during their long infancy women were in fact the ones who imposed the rules.Thesewerefrequently broken. Invading and conquering armies often put entire communities to the sword. But even in suchatrocious cases, history tells us thatthe men werethe first victims and women’s lives were often spared even if their destiny was to be carried off into slavery.

Beliefs about some golden age in palaeolithic times when people lived peacefully together inharmonious matriarchy have dubious foundation. It has, indeed, been claimed, with better evidence, that hardly any human remains have been found in prehistoric burial grounds that did not show signs of their original possessors having met with violent deaths.

Hence it is notsurprising that in pre-modern times attitudes to sexuality were quite different from those current in our affluent, medicated and pleasure-loving societies.Whatever cults of eroticism may have existed among tiny ruling élites, ordionysiac orgies and fertility festivals ritually indulged in by the masses of lowly folk, peasant women could do no other than look on sexual activity as something to be strictly regulated. Pregnancy and childbirth were risk-laden enterprises. Perhaps some sturdy peasant girls might give birth painlessly in the fields and then happily carry on with their work.But for very many this was not the case. Under-nourishment and disease were widespread and death in childbirth was common. So, too, after the fifteenth century was syphilis.No wonder then that families reareddaughters in the cult of pre-marital virginity and fidelity in marriage.Men did not have to impose the idea of sexual sin on women. Nature usually provided sanctions enough.To say this is not to imply that society generally did not reinforce these sanctions by custom and by law. Young people’s strong instinctual urges had to be contained by the older and wiser who knew the dangers involved.

Women taken in adultery have been stoned to death in some societies.Clitoridectomy still persists in certain parts of the world.Chastity belts are said to have been forced on medieval ladies.Chinese upper-class women had their feet bound and whether this was for aesthetic reasons or originally to prevent them straying is open to question.Barbarous customs indeed! As were those of the castration of men to produce guards and choristers.Until the advent of Enlightenment humanism everybody, male and female, even in Christian lands, took barbaric practices for granted.People were hanged, drawn and quartered and burned at the stake—men in far greater numbers than women—and multitudes of both sexes and all ages flocked avidly to view these horrible spectacles as lately as the eighteenth century, often taking picnic baskets along with them to enjoy the show. To maintain a sense of proportion, and of shame,we should also not forget that our own ‘enlightened’ twentieth century has been a time of periodic mass slaughter of both sexes even in the most advanced countries.So it is quite simply not true that cruelty, labour or the regulation of sexual activity were inventions of the post-Enlightenment bourgeoisie composed of ‘white European males.’

At certain times in history physically defective and girl babies were ruthlessly eliminated. Male children have been generally regarded as more desirable than female children but not merely out of some perverse masculine preference. It has been said that this is yet one more example of patriarchal oppression of the female sex. However, ithasmore to do with the fact that, until very recently, both foetal and infant mortality in males has been significantly higher than in females as any study of sex ratios in this areademonstrates.So boy babies were, and in most parts of the world still are, especiallyprecious. Medical science, hygiene and better nourishment have caused infant mortality to drop to almost negligible levels in the industrially advanced world. Because nature provides for more males to be conceived, more boys than girls are now being born and reaching adulthood—a historically unique phenomenon.

People generally did not question their sexual identity or the rulesconcerning marriage and the family that prevailed in their respective cultures. Within Christian and certain other societies, clerical celibacy and the monastic life have been practised by a minority and in some places honoured more than marriage. Chastity, it was said, was a higher state but monasticism may well have been as much a matter of ecclesiastical economics as of virtue. It certainly had nothing to do with sexual identity. The choice of celibacy, involving discipline and self-sacrifice, was rather a matter of character.Joan of Arc may have been a warrior but she never claimed to be other than a woman.

It should also be added that, however immutable seemed the sexual identity of men and women, character and behaviour in terms of sexual morals was not uniform either in time or place. There were periods of dissoluteness and moral breakdown as well as periods of reform, of which the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation are the most memorable examples. Similarly with Islam whose history is punctuated by revolts against what purist Moslems have regarded as relapses from the idealsof its original teachings.

Sexual identity and the onset of modernity

One of the first recorded manifestos in favour of female equality was that of Olympe de Gouges, a Frenchwoman who proclaimed her indignation at the time of the French Revolution over the treatment of women by the authors of the Rights of Man. She wanted the same rights for women and set them out in Les Droits dela Femme.This document is notable for its insistence that the same duties should be expected of women as of men including the payment of taxes and ‘the right to mount the scaffold’ because women should be ‘dealt with in the full rigour of the law’.2

The French Revolution inspired other women to demand citizenship rights. Anne-Josèphe Thérouingue de Méricourt went so far as to organize a female militia.The Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft went to Paris and produced the Vindications of the Rights of Women.Malerevolutionaries remained unmoved but Olympe de Gouges was granted one of her demands: she was guillotined during the Terror.3

At the end of the eighteenth century women such as these were voices crying in the wilderness but the ideals of freedom and equality proclaimed by the American and then the French Revolutions had seized popular imagination. In the course of the following century-and-a-half more voices were raised, not leastthose of men, to affirm that women too should enjoy these rights.As economic conditions changed with industrialization and increasing numbers of women joined the growing ranks of factory-workers so toomore and more women began to take part in literary and intellectual life.It was becoming clear to the fair-minded that if women were emerging from their traditional home-bound interests justicewas no longer being served by denying them full citizenship rights. The role of women like Florence Nightingale in the Crimean Warand later the pressing need for women in the factories and as military auxiliaries during the First World War began to sound the knell for the ancient institution of women’s civic subordination. Women’s organizationsdemanded the vote and went on to widen their claims. Opinion in society began to change until one by one additional rights were conceded.

None of this could have taken place without accelerated technological change, and expansion of medical knowledge. Mechanization made it possible for women to perform many tasks hitherto regarded as the preserve of men.The teachings of Malthus and declining mortality rates made large families no longer as desirable as hitherto. Family planning began the process of relieving women from the burden of annual child-birth.At the same time growing market economies demanded expansion of the work-force.Multiplier effects caused theprocess to speed up in incipient forms in the thirties of the twentieth century, then at a vertiginous rate after the Second World War. The age of consumerism dawned.The home too became mechanized and household appliances began to relieve women of domestic drudgery.Because purchasing power was needed to acquire these new machineswomennow had an even greater incentive tocontribute to family incomes. Business interests and governments were quick to see the pointof double-income households. The last bastions of women’s minority status finally crumbled in the decades following the Second World War, during which women had taken part in all the Allied Armed Forces.

With generalized knowledge of and access to more efficient contraceptiontogether with market need for women workers and consumers at all levels, profound changes have taken place throughout Western society.Women’s’ access to higher education in equal if not greater numbers than men and the growingpresence of womeninhigh status positions in both public office and private enterprise havegiven many women an unprecedented degree of economic independence.This, together with juridical consecration of equal rights for women as well as the generalized hedonistic ethos induced by consumer society,have eroded many traditional constraints on social behaviour generally.

The question arises:what happened to sexual identity and character during the century-and-a-half-long process just summarized?Anyone who, like me, grew up in the thirties and forties of this century remembers that what was foremost in the minds of many young people tempted to anticipate marriage in those far-off days was fear of pregnancy. We also remember that what kept many an unhappily married couple together was the economic dependence of most wives.Generally speaking, it was the rich who got divorces in those days.This is not to say that moral principles did not inspire very many people to practice sexual restraint, forego divorce or behave responsibly towards their families. Of course people had ethical convictions about these matters and tried to live up to them.But we should have no illusions that it was moral conviction alone that guided sexual behaviour at a time when there was already a great deal of social freedom between the sexes at least in northern Europe and North America.

Most people of my generation can well remember that when these questions were discussed, there was always somebody around to warn us of the moral collapse that would follow if everybody knew about and could procure safe contraception.Very often the same people would also caution us about how wholesale economic independence of women would threaten the existence of the family. My generation of young women at university or in the Armed Forces during the Second World War all heard these warnings. Our answer to the Cassandras, that is the answer of those of us who, like myself,regarded ourselves as high-minded feminists (of the old school), was that there was no moral value in behaving decently through fear.Better-educated women and women in the professions and satisfying jobs were likely, we thought, to have a greater sense of responsibility and better-grounded moral convictions than our poor subjected sisters whose morality we saw rather simplistically as being based largely on convention backed up by duress.

We also argued that the emancipation of women would affect men in a positive direction: they would be more likely to see women as equal companions in marriage rather than as mere objects of sexual satisfaction, mothers of their children, housekeepers and nurses.Marriage itself, we thought, had begun to assume a new content.Instead of being regarded as a ‘meal-ticket’ andstatus symbol for women or a source of sensual comforts for men, many people of both sexes began to view marriage essentially as a partnership of companions and equals.Even the ideal of romantic love, incipient for centuries, but which had overwhelmed the West from the nineteenth century onwards, became permeated witha new ideal of comradeship between men and women.

Whatever arcane discussions may have been conducted in the salons of such as the Bloomsbury Group4most people, including socialists, did not dream of questioning the traditional concept of sexual identity: that there are two sexes, male and female.Although we knew homosexuality existed the very word seemed to identify males as males and females as females: the word simply meant ‘same-sex sex’.The days of ‘polymorphous perversity’ were still far in the future.

The modern world becomes ‘post-modernist’

As the twentieth century draws to a close the Cassandras of myyouth wouldseem to have been vindicated. This is not the place to cite statistics showing the direct relationship between family breakdown and juvenile delinquency. These are readily available and show that there is cause for grave concern about social stability in all the democratic countries.5 The question at issue is whether these problems, which evidence profound moral and identity crises, are a consequence of the emancipation of women or whether the roots of that crisis are to be found in the same circumstances which brought about female emancipation.

If they are indeed interconnected and the inevitable accompaniment of modernization in any culture, then it is notthe West alone that faces such problems but also the rest of the world.On the other hand it may be that Western traditions before and during the process of modernization embody specific features conducive to the present crisis.How thevarious nations of the world with their very different histories and cultures are able to cope with these problems is perhaps one of the key questions to be posed as we enter the twenty-first century. If problems of identity and social cohesion deepen in some countries and are overcome in others it is not difficult to imagine which will grow stronger and which weaker.Perhaps Spengler6and Toynbee7may be proved correct in their deep pessimism about the future of the West.

Relativism and deconstruction

The most characteristic feature of the intellectual climate (in the Humanities as opposed to Science) in Western countries throughout most of this century has been the insistent rise of self-questioning and relativism in epistemology and ethics. At no other time or place in the history of civilizations has there been such voluminous criticism of its own traditions andinstitutionsas amongintellectuals in Western society over the last three hundred years. It would seem that this phenomenon arises directly out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the growth of democratic institutions and the habit of increasingly free discussion.

From the Renaissance onwards interrogation has grown in momentum, and in every area of human interest, to the point that we might call the twentieth century as much the century of total iconoclasm as of totalitarianism. Indeed it may well be that the former has more than a little to do with the latter. The situation contains its ironies, not least of which being that a procedure (rational criticism) which arose out of protest against dogma together withthe search for truth and greater knowledge has now culminated in what amounts to the denial of rationality and of objective knowledge.For this is indeed the characteristic of what is called post-modernism, a catch-all expression applied to a number of areas including art, literature, philosophy and the social sciences.

Deconstructionism, an influential trend in post-modernist philosophy, has as its basic tenetthat what we think of as knowledge is always suspect because it can only be reached through language and culture and these are not what they seem.They contain hidden meaning and require to be deconstructed, unbuilt, in order to reveal thepower relations that lie behind all discourse.In brief, there is no real world but only subjective interpretations of it. In all areas of life the holders of power impose their interpretations on the powerless in order the better to keep them in thrall.

These ideas, which have their source inmarxist doctrines, descend from the ‘sociologists of knowledge’ and find their apogee in the writings of people like Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida,Michel Foucault8 and Jean Lyotard.Foucault’s is thename of most significance here because his ideas have had considerable if not primordialinfluence on the development of ‘gender theory’.

Foucault’s favourite rejoinder to his critics was the question D’où parles-tu?Any objection was thus undermined, the implication being that the critic had a hidden interest in attempting to refute Foucault’s views. This kind of pseudo-refutation is common in unscientific theories such as Marxism and Freudianism which are couched in such terms as to render them unfalsifiable. The stance of relativists such as Foucault and others that there is no such thing as truth is, of course, very much like the classic paradox of the Cretan liar. If they are right, then they are wrong, forthey present their denial of truth as itself an absolute truth and they may thus be attacked from their own premises.D’où parles-tu? alsomay logically be turned on Foucault and his followers with the question D’où parlent-ils? However, to point this out, did not impress Foucault because despite his enormous (though often faulty) erudition he was contemptuous of rationality and regarded the Enlightenment as the initiator of those two perverse enemies of human well-being: logocentrism or, worse, phallogocentrism.

Logocentrism is the deconstructionists’ word for the belief that there exists a real world and that it can bedescribed in words. Phallogocentrism isthe word usedto describe what Foucault regarded as compulsory heterosexuality, yet another stratagemof the bourgeoisie to preserve its power.It is clear inthesewriters that the enemy to be struck down is western culture and all its traditions, including science and logic, seen as a kind of monstrous conspiracy to preserve capitalism. When pressed, deconstructionists will admit, even proclaim, that their position does in fact entail that ‘anything goes’.Your views are as good as mine; your behaviour as admissible as mine:there exist no standards and no moral values.All these things had been said by others long before Foucault.The source of his fascination for the radical generations that arose during and after May 1968 was the length to which he took his radicalism.From a critique of the concept of insanity to that of the prison system andcriminalityhe went on to a sure-fire winner with his Histoire de la Sexualité.9 Here the concept of sexual identity itself was challenged and declared to be a social construct.Heterosexuality, it was claimed, was not an essential component of human identity but had been imposed on society in the interests of those in power in order to force people (including members of the bourgeoisie themselves)to devote their energies to work.Precisely how people would feed, clothe and house themselves if they gave up work for a life dedicated to multi-sexual pleasure we are not told.

The conclusion seems inescapable that the adoption on an individual levelofrelativism as an intellectual and moral life style provides an excuse for mental laziness in the first case and self-indulgence in the second.As far as society as a whole is concerned the prevalence and propagation of cultural relativism tends to deprive many people, especially the young and vulnerable, of anchorage for their sense of identity and furthers anomie, rootlessness and irresponsibility.

This brief digression into the realm of philosophy is ofrelevance to the subject of‘gender theory’ because many of its main proponents claim the status of philosophers and regard Foucault as their inspiration. Deconstructionism has rapidly gained adepts in Humanities departments in universities all over the English-speaking world.This phenomenal success for bizarre theories which, at one time, could easily have been ‘deconstructed’ by a first-year Philosophy undergraduate, can surprise nobody familiar with the declining standards in education.There are no doubt other causes too, which reside in the narcissistic ethos prevalent in consumer societies and the irresistible appeal of what looks like an intellectual justification for unbridled pleasure-seeking.And so Foucault, the white, European male, became the guru and inspirer of ‘gender feminists’. In truth his ideas were tailor-made for them, providing a scholarly-sounding mantle for the proclamation of war against the concept of sexual identity. In the universities, at least, the war has had considerable success and the battle-fields have been in the social sciences andespecially Women’s Studies.

There is another, less scholarlyand more scientistic, strand in the tangled web of influences that have given rise to ‘gender theory’: the new discipline of sexology pioneered by Kraffte-Ebbing, Havelock Ellis, and Wilhelm Reich. Some of these were long-banned and available only to the medical profession. Alfred Charles Kinsey and his associates, however, in a time of relaxed censorship, burst upon the world in 1948 and 195310 with reports of supposedly scientific studies which were seized upon avidly by the media and became best-sellers.Still widely cited today, both Kinsey’s methods and his results have been subjected to serious criticism especially in connexion with the atypical subjects he interviewed: mainly students and members of prison populations. He has also been accused of sexual experimentation with infants and young children.11 evertheless, some of Kinsey’s conclusionsbecame widely accepted, especially his highly dubious figures regarding the incidence in the population of homosexuality—placed at more than ten percent when more recent and more serious studies conclude for one to two percent.12 Even more influential was Kinsey’s hypothesis of the fluidity of sexual identity and the existence of a continuumrather than a dichotomy.Kinsey may be regarded as the founding-father of a flourishing and lucrative industry, well-suited to the developing media ethos of sensationalism and the satisfaction of prurient curiosity.Much latoer and more serious studies in the field,13 which undermine what have become received perceptions, have aroused less publicity and are largely forgotten in the field of ‘gender studies’. Also influential in promoting the ‘anything goes’ sexual ethos were certain psycho-analytic practitioners such as Carl Rogers and his ‘Human Potential Movement’.

By 1993 Women’s Studies was‘by far the fastest-growing area within the humanities and social sciences, both institutionally and in terms of publications.It is estimated thatthere are now five hundred women’s studies programs, thirty thousand courses, and fifty feminist institutes…’ in the United States.14 Visitors to any academic book-shop may confirm for themselves the industrial quantities of titles that have been published in the field. What has come to be known in more recent years as ‘queer studies’ has also expanded, though to a lesser degree.Because its preoccupation appears mainly to bewith male homosexuality, by definition less concerned with the emancipation of women, this branch of‘gendertheory’ has not made the same inroads into public forums as ‘gender feminism’ which claims to speak for all women.The fraternal branch of ‘gender studies’ will therefore not be discussed here although the two share many basic ideas.

A word about words

The word ‘gender’ is now in common use in the English-speaking countries to refer to something other than the technical grammatical classification of nouns and adjectives.The new usage has become so widespread in the English-speaking world that to challenge it now sounds old-fashioned and idiosyncratic.However, the new sense represents a key concept in the Pandora’s box of ‘political correctness’and has almost everything to do with challenging the traditional (binary) concept of sexual identity.

One preliminary objection to the new usage, now employed throughout the social sciences and in the media,is that it is virtually untranslatable and there is something very odd about a concept that cannot be expressed inlanguages other than English.Even for those who know only English a moment’s reflexion will demonstrate how peculiar is the recent innovation. Its inappropriateness is clear when we try to employ it with reference to reproduction. All reproduction in the animal world (with the occasional exception of lowly creatures like gastropods and certain reptiles) from insect-life upwards is sexual reproduction, i.e. through the union of male and female. This is a biological given, not a social construct.Biologists, botanists, zoologists, ethnologists and so on habitually talk about ‘sexual reproduction’ and regard it as the means whereby diversity of inheritance and the survival capacities of a species are ensured.They are not referring to erotic activity.

The insistence of some English-speakers on the use of the word ‘gender’ has indeed given rise to considerable difficulties in international forums and an illuminating example of this will be discussed below. This is because languages that do possess grammatical gender—and these are most ofthe European languages except English and Dutch—also use the word ‘gender’ in a variety of different ways none of which refer to the sex of human beings:First: genus, family, race kind. Second: kind, manner, sort, way. Third: artistic style, manner. Fourth: manners, fashion, taste.15

‘Gender theory’, let it be clear,refers tothe cluster of ideas which attack in no uncertain terms the traditional concept of sexual identity. ‘Gender theorists’ are thought of as radical feminists and sometimes style themselves as such although there are various factions in the movement whose quibbles need not concern us.However, ‘gender feminism’, as will be seen, is not in fact the culmination of the movement for women’s emancipation: it is rathera programme for the abolition of women and of men, an aim explicitly stated by some of its proponents

‘Gender theory’ in words

For the sake of clarification ‘gender theorists’ must be allowed to speak for themselves. The authors quoted below are not marginal butexemplify ‘gender theory’.Most of the publicationsfrom which they are taken are to be found in course material in Women’s Studies departments and some of the authors are leading figures in the radical feminist movement.

Although many people think that men and women are the natural expression of genetic blueprint, gender is a product of human thought and culture, a social construction that creates the ‘true nature ‘ of all individuals.16

Heterosexuality has been both forcibly and subliminally imposed on women…’Compulsory heterosexuality’ was named as one of the ‘crimes against women’ by the Brussels International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in 1976.17

An appropriate workable abortion-rights strategy is to inform all women that heterosexual penetration is rape, whatever their subjective experience to the contrary.18

…heterosexuality, like motherhood, needs to be recognized and studied as a political institution19

Gender fluidity is the ability to freely and knowingly become one or many of a limitless number of genders, for any length of time, at any rate of change. Gender fluidity recognizes no borders or rules ofgender20

Women couldn’t be oppressed if there was no such thing as ‘women’. Doing away with gender is key to the doing away with patriarchy.21

Imagine that the sexes have multiplied beyond currently imaginable limits. It would have to be a world of shared powers.Patient and physician, parent and child, male and female, heterosexual and homosexual—all those oppositions and others would have to be dissolved as sources of division. A new ethic of medical treatment would arise, one that would permit ambiguity in a culture that had overcome sexual division.22

Imagine sex among friends as the norm. Imagine valuing genital interaction in terms of whether and how it fosters friendship and pleasure… Pleasure is our birthright of which we have been robbed in religious patriarchy… I picture friends, not families, basking in the pleasure we deserve because our bodies are holy.23

Gay/lesbian culture can also be looked on as a subversive force that can challenge the hegemonic nature of the idea of the family.It can, however, be done in a way that people do not feel is in opposition to the family per se,a simple ‘smash the family’ slogan is seen as a threat not so much to the ruling class as to people in the working class who often rely on family ties to maintain security and stability in their lives. In order for the subversive nature of gay culture to be used effectively, we have to be able to present alternative ways of looking at human relationships.24

One of the most influential of the ‘gender theorists’is Judith Butler.She is Professor of Humanities at the JohnsHopkinsUniversity and is listed as a director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC).The commission is a UN accredited NGO and sponsor of the international petition campaign ‘Put Sexuality on the Agenda of the World Conference on Women’ The petition called on member states to recognize ‘the right to determine one’s sexual identity; the right to control one’s own body, particularly in establishing intimate relations, and the right to choose if, when and with whom to bear or raise children as fundamental components of the human rights of all women regardless of sexual orientation’.25

Butler’s book, Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identityis widely cited in ‘Women’s Studies’ course material. the right to determine one’s sexual identity; the right to control one’s own body, particularly in establishing intimate relations, and the right to choose if, when and with whom to bear or raise children as fundamental

Assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of ‘men’ will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that ‘women’ will interpret only female bodies. Further, even if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their morphology and constitution (which will become a question) there is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two. The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relations of gender to sex whereby gendermirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it. When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and femininea male body as a female one. 26

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequences that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.27

Shulamith Firestone, another prestigious ‘gender theoretician’, is also one of the most explicitly Marxist andcomprehensive. The Vintage Book of Feminism declares Firestone’s book The Dialectic of Sex (dedicated to Simone de Beauvoir) ‘to have been a powerful force in shaping the ideas of radicals in the women’s movement—Robin Morgan considered it ‘a basic building block’ of feminism that had been crucial to the development of her thinking.’28

For a foretaste of the ‘gender’ utopia it is worth giving her writing some attention.

Natural reproductive differences between the sexes led directly to the first division of labor based on sex, which is at the origins of all further division into economic and cultural classes.29

So that just as to assureelimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underclass (the proletariat) and, in a temporary dictatorship, their seizure of the means of production, so to assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of reproduction: the restoration to women of ownership of their own bodies, as well as feminine control of human fertility, including both the new technology and all the social institutions of childbearing and childrearing. And just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself; genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.30

Thus, the ‘natural’ is not necessarily a ‘human’ value. Humanity has begun to outgrow nature, we can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on the grounds of its origins in Nature. Indeed, for pragmatic reasons alone it is beginning to look as if we must get rid of it.31

The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction; children would be born to both sexes equally, or independently of either, however, one chooses to look at it.’32

The incest taboo is now necessary only in order to preserve the family; then if we did away with the family we would in effect be doing away with the repressions that mold sexuality into specific formations. All other things being equal, people might still prefer those of the opposite sex simply because it is physically more convenient.33

If early sexual repression is the basic mechanism by which character structures supporting political, ideological, and economic serfdom are produced, an end to the incest taboo, through the abolition of the family, could have profound effects.Sexuality would be released from its straitjacket to eroticise our whole culture, changing its very definitions.34

We must include theoppression of children in any program of feminist revolution… Our final step must be the elimination of the very conditions of femininity and childhood.35

Adult/child and homosexual sex taboos would disappear, as well as nonsexual friendship…. All close relationships would include the physical.36

Among Firestone’sfirst demands forany alternative system are :

The freeing of women from the tyranny of their reproductive biology by every means available, and the diffusion of the childbearingand childrearing role to the society as a whole, men as well as women…4. The freedom of all women and children to do whatever they wish to do sexually…Child sexuality had to be repressed because it was a threat to the precarious internal balance of the family. These sexual repressions increased proportionately to the degree of cultural exaggeration of the biological family.… In our new society, humanity could finally revert to its natural ‘polymorphously perverse’ sexuality—all forms of sexuality would beallowed and indulged….marriage in its very definition will never be able to fulfil the needs of its participants, for it was organized around, and reinforces, a fundamentally oppressive biological condition that we only now have the skill tocorrect. As long as we have the institution we shall have the oppressive conditions at its base. We need to start talking about new alternatives that will satisfy the emotional and psychological needs that marriage, archaic as it is, still satisfies, but that will satisfy them better.’37

The foregoing quotations clearly show that ‘gender theory’ holds that it is the hegemony of men which compelswomen to be heterosexual. Indeed some gender-feminists go so far as to declare that without this compulsion lesbianism wouldbe preferred. Others, like Firestone, also favour pedophilia and incest. Some want ‘lesbianization of the world’ (Monique Wittig as cited by Butler).Others want sex with anybody at all, singly or in groups.What is truly preposterous about these scabrous pronouncements is that their saturnalian (or better, satanic) fantasies have found a firm niche in formerly respectable quarters.Humanities undergraduates, instead of learning something of the great cultural heritage of civilization are instead being taught to despise what they do not know and indoctrinated with something more akin to pornographic science-fiction.

Gender-theory in action

‘Gender theory’ should not be dismissed as beingall talk.Not only doesit occupy an important place in Women’s Studies and Humanities departments, it has also become an issue in international organizations. An example of the way ‘gender theorists’ operate was provided by the discussionsduring the preparations for and in the course of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held in the Chinese capital inSeptember 1995.38

Among the Beijing participants discussion of the word ‘gender’ in the documentsaroused considerable controversy between, on the one hand, some English-speaking delegates and, on the other, representatives of that benighted majority of the world’s women for whom English is not the mother-tongue. These had at first innocentlyassumed that the word ‘gender’ was indeed being used as a euphemism for the word‘sex’ and that ‘gender’ referred to male and female human beings. However,there was no optionin the translations butto use the respective languages’ word for ‘sex’.

The controversy that ensued revealed the pitfalls that beset meetings where well-meaning innocence confronts malevolent ignorance.However, in the course of proceedings it became explicit that the use of this unfamiliar concept was a ploy intended to smuggle into documents the UN-blessed recognition by women’s organizations world-wide of a number of ‘rights’ usually rejected as immoral by pro-family women’s organizations. These rights included those ofhomosexuality to be regarded as equal to heterosexuality; total freedom and assistance for abortion; sex for adolescents; prostitution as a service industry as well as the adoption by governments of quotas for women in all areas of public life.

Unfortunately for ‘gender feminists’ there were English-speakers present from pro-family organizations who were familiar with the take-over of Women’s Studies programs in US universities. In consequence, fierce polemics ensued in the course of whichthe ‘gender perspective’ was exposed. Comparison between the different texts was elucidative: although ‘gender’ appeared over 60 times in the Feb 27, 1975, English draft, the equivalent words genero andgenre were never used in the Spanish or French versions. Instead ‘gender’ was translated as sexo (sex) or hombres y mujeres (men and women) or with some other phrase. In some cases the English, French and Spanish each had a different meaning.

So it seems that there is something peculiarly anglo-centric about ‘gender’.Its critics were ferociously attacked by the ‘gender’ feminists who saw this as a reactionary onslaught on ‘political correctness’.Former US congresswoman Bella Abzug spoke for the ‘gender feminists’ and her claims were revealing:

The concept ofgender is embedded in contemporary social, political and legal discourse. ….The meaning of the word gender has evolved as differentiated from the word sex to express the reality that women’s and men’s roles and status are socially constructed and subject to change…

The current attempt by several Member States to expunge the word gender from the Platform for Action and to replace it with the word sex is an insulting and demeaning attempt to reverse the gains made by women, to intimidate us, and to block further progress. We urge the small number of male and female delegates seeking to side-track and sabotage the empowerment of women to cease this diversionary tactic.They will not succeed. They will only waste precious time. We will not go back to subordinate inferior roles.39

Because the ‘gender feminists’ were better prepared and better funded,their unrepresentative ideas, although they were forced to be toned down, did in fact find their way into the final Beijing documents.This was no new phenomenon.The ‘gender perspective’ is to be encountered in a multitude of other UN materials as well as that of western government departments,those of the European Union and of the European Parliament.

Social conditioning and sexual identity

Rejection of relativism does not entail underestimation of the importance of social conditioning in the formation of identity.Simone de Beauvoir is famous for her oft-quoted remark that one is not born a woman but rather becomes one. This rather trivial observation has been granted far more weight than it deserved.In one sense it contains a banal truth. In another it contains a falsehood. Everybody is born male or female.The kind of men or women they become will, of course, be influenced by the way they are socialized. The experience and education of a child within its culture and the expectations it encounters are of great importance in forming its identity and character. Interaction between the innate and the culturally-shaped have long been discussed in the ‘nature versus nurture’ controversy in connexion with intelligence and other qualities.In the matter of sexual identity there is an added aspect and biological function may in a very primary sense influence the way an individual is socialized.If the survival conditions of a given society require females to be protected and dependent upon men, the culture will see to it that members of each sexare socialized accordingly. Experience will provide the growing human with many of the elements that enable it to construct its identity. The process is essentially an interactive one.

It seems to me of considerable importance that we are not born as selves, but that we have to learn that we are selves; in fact we have to learn to be selves40 bein self is partly the result of inborn dispositions and partly the result of experience, especially social experience. The new-born child has many inborn ways of acting and of responding, and many inborn tendencies to develop new responses and new activities. Among these tendencies is a tendency to develop into a person conscious of himself. But in order to achieve this, much must happen. A human child growing up in social isolation will fail to attain a full consciousness of self 41 …All learned adaptation has a genetic basis in the sense that the heredity of the organism (its ‘genome’) must provide for the aptitude of acquiring new adaptations.42

In traditional societies, in modernizing ones and in our own day the cultural elements that contribute to the child’s consciousness of selfhood, have varied.It can be argued that only with women’s emancipation and the material possibilities offull participationin socialand public life is the girl-child able to achieve full realization of self.The boy-child’s consciousness of identity is also subject to change.Sometimes nowadays for the worse.Instead of the male ideal evolving from the role of protector-dominator of women towards that of equal partner and companion, too many features of our culture are helping to produce boy-children who will turn into irresponsible aggressors.If ‘gender-theory’ gains in influence, as it aims to, it will also have a negative effect on the sense of identity of young women.The socialization (‘consciousness-raising’) engaged in by women’s studies aims at producing females who see themselves as victims of men, as ‘gender-fluid’ creatures hostile to the family and with their inborn vocation for motherhood suppressed. The damaging effects on the personalities of impressionable young girls caused by this kind of brain-washing are easy to predict. However, there are considerable difficulties for the success of such projects. The genetic predisposition of females—the essential basis of their identity—for motherhood and child-rearing are much stronger than the genetic predispositions of males for fatherhood.The latter need more positive socialization in order to become mature citizens.‘Gender-feminists’ find it very difficult to convert ordinary women into changing their natural propensities.This is why they resort, as in the end do all revolutionaries, to administrative means to gain their ends, as we have seen with the Beijing case.

‘Gender feminists’ are also notable fortheir demagogy. To win support among vulnerable young women, as well as grossly distorting history they campaign against ‘sexual harassment’ and have extended the meaning of this expression beyond all reasonable bounds.The main effect of these campaigns is to cause women to feel more insecure (the victim cult) and to provoke in many young men more irresponsible behaviour than ever.To bolster these campaigns and other accusations of ‘patriarchal oppression’, many leading ‘gender theorists’ have had recourse to the ‘cooking’ of statistics over a wide field.Christina Hoff Summers has produced an impressive array of examples of this practice.41 Another demagogic ploy has been the demand for quotas or affirmative action which, if put into effect, can only damage the credibility of competent women and further irritate relations between men and women.A ‘hidden agenda’ that may well lie behind this demand will be suggested below.

Ethnicity and ‘gender’

‘Gay and Lesbian’ activist groups including ‘gender feminists’ make frequent declarations about ‘minority rights’ and tend to seek allieswith activists among those ethnic groups which see themselves as disadvantaged. To maintain that anything significant other than physical features isbiologically innate about race is generally regarded as redolent of racism. The desire of‘gender’ theorists’ to make common cause with certain kinds of nationalism clearly owes itself to the subjacent intention ofdrawing parallels between ‘gender’ and ethnicity.Because there is a vast plurality of ethnic groups, why not a vast plurality of‘genders’?Because ethnicity is often fluid,why not ‘gender’?Because nationalist protest and revolt are frequently against real oppression or discrimination, if ‘gender’ activists associate with them they too can be seen as victims. To insist on the essential nature of sexual identity is to be ‘sexist’ and that is bad, as it is bad to be a ‘racist’. This is an old story in the history of protest movements, especially the spurious ones.They amalgamate issues in order to confuse them.

Deconstructing the deconstructors

The final question to be answered is why I have chosen ‘gender theory’ and ‘gender feminists’ as my main concern in these pages and have said very little about contemporary challenges to male identity. The reason has to do with thatessence of female identity, whichclearly ‘gender feminists’ are very well aware of.When they propose not just affirmative action and parity for women in all areas of social life, but even amendments to the US Constitution to provide for two senators from each sex for each State of the Union, ‘gender feminists’ know what they are doing. Their aim is to obtain a captiveconstituency. They know only too well—they have discussed it often enough in their proposals for the virtual abolition of motherhood—that the majority of women, whether they work outside the home or not, have neither time nor inclination for positions ofpublic power and are unlikely to want to give up motherhood and family life for the often shabby rewards of politics.Some lesbians may be mothers; most are not.This gives homosexual women a considerable edge over the generality of heterosexual women both in the labour and political market-place—an advantage that homosexual men do not enjoy with regard to heterosexual men.Nor can homosexual men aspire to lead grassroots men’s emancipation movements, did such exist.

Lesbian women, however, claim to speak for all women andto represent them in positions of power.Their quota, parity and similar proposals, if put into effect, would inevitably help them realize this ambition.It can be argued that ‘gender feminists’ have a strategy of achieving power on the backs of ordinary women, in the same way as Bolshevik middle-class intellectuals rose to power in Russia on the backs of the proletariat.And all in the name of the struggle against the powerful.Perhaps Foucault’s question needs to be reformulated:D’où parlent-elles? What are these unrepresentative women’s hidden interests?Many already proclaim their aim of overthrowing existing society.Who then will be Big Sister?

Although ‘queer theorists’ share with their female counterparts, general deconstructionist approaches there arecrucial contradictions between them. The latter, as we have seen, insist on the primacy of social construction of sexual identity and would undermine or even go so far as trying to destroy its biological foundation.Many male homosexual spokesmen, however, are now beginning, as part of their demand for recognition of minority status, to insist on the importance of innate factors.‘Gender feminism’ is unremitting in its hostility to marriage and the family.Many male homosexuals are asking for these institutions to be available to them.Discussion of such questions is beyond the scope of this paper.Except for one comment: the so-called ‘Gay and Lesbian’ alliance seems to be as basically incoherent and unstable as any alliance of these two with ethnic minority activism.

Conclusion

The replacement of the word ‘sex’ by the word ‘gender’ seems to be yet one more example of an old technique: what Orwell called Newspeak or Françoise Thomlangue de bois. Give something another name and you obscure its true nature. Get people to use it and you have brain-washed them.As with ‘people’s democracy’ or‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, if you repeat an expression often enough and persuade people to use it, many of them end up accepting that it describes a real state of affairs.Here, in truth, reside power interests behind the use of words.

To use the word ‘gender’ instead of ‘sex’, no matter how innocently, is to give implicit credit to the new word’shidden meanings:the suggestion that sexual identity is fluid; that there may be more than two ‘genders’;that people make ‘gender’ options. What ‘gender theory’ denies is that in the real world there exist only two sexes, male and female andthe norm is for humans, like animals, to seek and prefer erotic relations with individuals of the opposite sex. In other words, mothers are women and fathers are men and parenting is most successful within a family structure. The very small minority which prefers necessarily sterile carnal union with members of their own sex still remain either biologically male or female with the potential of being fathers or mothers. The existence of a negligible number of unfortunates born with genital malformations who are physiologically pseudo-hermaphrodites ‘doesn’t prove that heterosexuality is not natural, any more than the fact that some babies are born blind proves that it isn’t natural for human beings to see’.44

In concluding this appraisal of‘Gender as Identity’ I would like to quote from the last page of Dale O’Leary’s analysis of the Beijing meeting.It is a succinct and timely statement which should be pondered by everybody concerned with the human sciences and the clarification of identity questions in the area of sex:

The feminists have relied on the politeness of men. They have demanded that dangerous nonsense and utter stupidity be treated with respect. The Gender Agenda cannot be defeated until people are willing to stand up and say, ‘No more inclusive language, no more politically correct speech.’ We must refuse to say ‘gender’ when we mean ‘sex’. Those who are offended by reality and human nature will just have to live with it 45

Notes

1. Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York,1986).

2. Norman Davies, Europe A History, (Oxford, 1996), p. 716.

3. Ibid., p.717.

4. The London literary circle known as the Bloomsbury Group, several of whose members were homosexual, frequently questioned sexual identity.See especially Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a novel about a trans-sexual figure reincarnated over four centuries.

7. Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History (abbreviated version, London 1946).

8. Foroverviews see J.G. Merquior, Foucault (London, 1985) and Roger Scruton Thinkers of the New Left (London, 1985), pp.31-44.Scruton’s Modern Philosophy (London1994) deals in several places with Post-modernism, Deconstructionism and Michel Foucault.

In no otherarea have traditional ideas been so challenged in recent years as in that of the relationship between the sexes and the way men and women see themselves and each other. In western universities and the forums of some international organizations a paradigm as old as the human species is being questioned and strange new patterns adumbrated. Never before have these subjects been so much discussed, studied, written up, campaigned about and legislated on as in the last three decades. Until very recently sexual identity and a broad typology of character for men on the one hand and women on the other have been thought to be fixed and unalterable.How sexual identity defined a person was seen as of a quite different order from other defining characteristics of human beings such as class, religion, nationality and ethnicity.And so it still is—except by proponents of what are known as ‘gender theory’ and its close relative, ‘queer theory’.

The apparent immutability of sexual identity is still the rule for the vast majority of human-kind and it is doubtful whether even in modern societies most people are likelyto have had their fundamental perceptions changed by such theories.The fact that women have risen in recent years to high positions in the State has very little to do with the matter. History is, after all, peppered with female figures who have exercised real power and this has never been a factor in changing perceptions aboutthe respective vocations and nature of ordinary men and women.What has indeed been changing is the attitude of members of both sexes to the participation of women in economic and public life.

Despite women’s emancipation in the industrialized countries, the majority of people still seem to have little doubtthat most men will become fathers and most women mothers and that children are best raised in families. Or the corollary that mothers are women and fathers are men. There is, however, growing public concern over some recent social trends, most evident in the English-speaking world and Scandinavian countries, which seem to indicate increasing family breakdown. Working wives and mothers, full citizenship rights for women, easy divorce and abortion and a growing number of women in leading positions in public and private administration have certainly had familial and wider social repercussions.It is therefore appropriate to examine the position of‘gender theorists’ in relation tothese questions.

It might be useful first to look at sexual identity and character in three phases: before women’s emancipation; secondly, during that process; and thirdly the situation as it exists today. Thisexamination requires to be undertaken in a spirit of realism rather than with a mind-set bent on seeking evidence of class oppression and the allegedpredisposition of men to dominate and exploit women. What follows is necessarily schematic and concerned rather with the lives of ordinary people than with the particularities in habit and outlook of tiny élites.

The sexes before modernization

Before the onset of modernization it was impossible for women to be other than dependent upon men. This fact requires brief elaboration because its implications are overlooked, denied or misinterpreted by ‘gender theory’ whose tenets are notable for lack of empathy with the main features of human history and of compassion for its essentially tragic content.

In traditional agrarian societies average life-expectancy was around forty years, about half what it is today. High mortality meant that a high birth rate was essential for a community’s survival, hence large families were very desirable.Most females were expected to marry as soon as they reached puberty and, if they were reasonably healthy and their husbands were not absent from home, the natural course was for women to conceive and give birth almost every year.Access to and knowledge of birth-control was unsought and therefore almost unknown.All but rich women, who could afford wet nurses, had to breast-feed their babies. Human beings of both sexestoiled from dawn to dusk in order to keep alive. Nearly everybody, includingmembers of ruling castes, was illiterate.Only a fewbelonged to the class of clerics and literati who could cultivate things of the mind.There was scant leisure for the masses. Public order and security in face of marauders and the elements were fragile.In such circumstances the very survival of humanity meant that women and children required protection. This requirement has been sacralized by religion and enshrined in law. It is here that we must seek the origin of the family and not in what Engels called ‘the overthrow of mother-right’ and ‘…the first class oppression… of the female sex by the male.’1

Of course women suffered from the necessarily subordinate position that dependence implies.But men suffered too.They frequently had to sacrifice life and limb in defence of their homes and families. Their incentive and reward were the honour and glory associated with the valour demanded of the ‘stronger sex’.Women brought up their sons in the cult of courage and duty to the family.It can well be argued that as the first educators and socializers of children during their long infancy women were in fact the ones who imposed the rules.Thesewerefrequently broken. Invading and conquering armies often put entire communities to the sword. But even in suchatrocious cases, history tells us thatthe men werethe first victims and women’s lives were often spared even if their destiny was to be carried off into slavery.

Beliefs about some golden age in palaeolithic times when people lived peacefully together inharmonious matriarchy have dubious foundation. It has, indeed, been claimed, with better evidence, that hardly any human remains have been found in prehistoric burial grounds that did not show signs of their original possessors having met with violent deaths.

Hence it is notsurprising that in pre-modern times attitudes to sexuality were quite different from those current in our affluent, medicated and pleasure-loving societies.Whatever cults of eroticism may have existed among tiny ruling élites, ordionysiac orgies and fertility festivals ritually indulged in by the masses of lowly folk, peasant women could do no other than look on sexual activity as something to be strictly regulated. Pregnancy and childbirth were risk-laden enterprises. Perhaps some sturdy peasant girls might give birth painlessly in the fields and then happily carry on with their work.But for very many this was not the case. Under-nourishment and disease were widespread and death in childbirth was common. So, too, after the fifteenth century was syphilis.No wonder then that families reareddaughters in the cult of pre-marital virginity and fidelity in marriage.Men did not have to impose the idea of sexual sin on women. Nature usually provided sanctions enough.To say this is not to imply that society generally did not reinforce these sanctions by custom and by law. Young people’s strong instinctual urges had to be contained by the older and wiser who knew the dangers involved.

Women taken in adultery have been stoned to death in some societies.Clitoridectomy still persists in certain parts of the world.Chastity belts are said to have been forced on medieval ladies.Chinese upper-class women had their feet bound and whether this was for aesthetic reasons or originally to prevent them straying is open to question.Barbarous customs indeed! As were those of the castration of men to produce guards and choristers.Until the advent of Enlightenment humanism everybody, male and female, even in Christian lands, took barbaric practices for granted.People were hanged, drawn and quartered and burned at the stake—men in far greater numbers than women—and multitudes of both sexes and all ages flocked avidly to view these horrible spectacles as lately as the eighteenth century, often taking picnic baskets along with them to enjoy the show. To maintain a sense of proportion, and of shame,we should also not forget that our own ‘enlightened’ twentieth century has been a time of periodic mass slaughter of both sexes even in the most advanced countries.So it is quite simply not true that cruelty, labour or the regulation of sexual activity were inventions of the post-Enlightenment bourgeoisie composed of ‘white European males.’

At certain times in history physically defective and girl babies were ruthlessly eliminated. Male children have been generally regarded as more desirable than female children but not merely out of some perverse masculine preference. It has been said that this is yet one more example of patriarchal oppression of the female sex. However, ithasmore to do with the fact that, until very recently, both foetal and infant mortality in males has been significantly higher than in females as any study of sex ratios in this areademonstrates.So boy babies were, and in most parts of the world still are, especiallyprecious. Medical science, hygiene and better nourishment have caused infant mortality to drop to almost negligible levels in the industrially advanced world. Because nature provides for more males to be conceived, more boys than girls are now being born and reaching adulthood—a historically unique phenomenon.

People generally did not question their sexual identity or the rulesconcerning marriage and the family that prevailed in their respective cultures. Within Christian and certain other societies, clerical celibacy and the monastic life have been practised by a minority and in some places honoured more than marriage. Chastity, it was said, was a higher state but monasticism may well have been as much a matter of ecclesiastical economics as of virtue. It certainly had nothing to do with sexual identity. The choice of celibacy, involving discipline and self-sacrifice, was rather a matter of character.Joan of Arc may have been a warrior but she never claimed to be other than a woman.

It should also be added that, however immutable seemed the sexual identity of men and women, character and behaviour in terms of sexual morals was not uniform either in time or place. There were periods of dissoluteness and moral breakdown as well as periods of reform, of which the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation are the most memorable examples. Similarly with Islam whose history is punctuated by revolts against what purist Moslems have regarded as relapses from the idealsof its original teachings.

Sexual identity and the onset of modernity

One of the first recorded manifestos in favour of female equality was that of Olympe de Gouges, a Frenchwoman who proclaimed her indignation at the time of the French Revolution over the treatment of women by the authors of the Rights of Man. She wanted the same rights for women and set them out in Les Droits dela Femme.This document is notable for its insistence that the same duties should be expected of women as of men including the payment of taxes and ‘the right to mount the scaffold’ because women should be ‘dealt with in the full rigour of the law’.2

The French Revolution inspired other women to demand citizenship rights. Anne-Josèphe Thérouingue de Méricourt went so far as to organize a female militia.The Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft went to Paris and produced the Vindications of the Rights of Women.Malerevolutionaries remained unmoved but Olympe de Gouges was granted one of her demands: she was guillotined during the Terror.3

At the end of the eighteenth century women such as these were voices crying in the wilderness but the ideals of freedom and equality proclaimed by the American and then the French Revolutions had seized popular imagination. In the course of the following century-and-a-half more voices were raised, not leastthose of men, to affirm that women too should enjoy these rights.As economic conditions changed with industrialization and increasing numbers of women joined the growing ranks of factory-workers so toomore and more women began to take part in literary and intellectual life.It was becoming clear to the fair-minded that if women were emerging from their traditional home-bound interests justicewas no longer being served by denying them full citizenship rights. The role of women like Florence Nightingale in the Crimean Warand later the pressing need for women in the factories and as military auxiliaries during the First World War began to sound the knell for the ancient institution of women’s civic subordination. Women’s organizationsdemanded the vote and went on to widen their claims. Opinion in society began to change until one by one additional rights were conceded.

None of this could have taken place without accelerated technological change, and expansion of medical knowledge. Mechanization made it possible for women to perform many tasks hitherto regarded as the preserve of men.The teachings of Malthus and declining mortality rates made large families no longer as desirable as hitherto. Family planning began the process of relieving women from the burden of annual child-birth.At the same time growing market economies demanded expansion of the work-force.Multiplier effects caused theprocess to speed up in incipient forms in the thirties of the twentieth century, then at a vertiginous rate after the Second World War. The age of consumerism dawned.The home too became mechanized and household appliances began to relieve women of domestic drudgery.Because purchasing power was needed to acquire these new machineswomennow had an even greater incentive tocontribute to family incomes. Business interests and governments were quick to see the pointof double-income households. The last bastions of women’s minority status finally crumbled in the decades following the Second World War, during which women had taken part in all the Allied Armed Forces.

With generalized knowledge of and access to more efficient contraceptiontogether with market need for women workers and consumers at all levels, profound changes have taken place throughout Western society.Women’s’ access to higher education in equal if not greater numbers than men and the growingpresence of womeninhigh status positions in both public office and private enterprise havegiven many women an unprecedented degree of economic independence.This, together with juridical consecration of equal rights for women as well as the generalized hedonistic ethos induced by consumer society,have eroded many traditional constraints on social behaviour generally.

The question arises:what happened to sexual identity and character during the century-and-a-half-long process just summarized?Anyone who, like me, grew up in the thirties and forties of this century remembers that what was foremost in the minds of many young people tempted to anticipate marriage in those far-off days was fear of pregnancy. We also remember that what kept many an unhappily married couple together was the economic dependence of most wives.Generally speaking, it was the rich who got divorces in those days.This is not to say that moral principles did not inspire very many people to practice sexual restraint, forego divorce or behave responsibly towards their families. Of course people had ethical convictions about these matters and tried to live up to them.But we should have no illusions that it was moral conviction alone that guided sexual behaviour at a time when there was already a great deal of social freedom between the sexes at least in northern Europe and North America.

Most people of my generation can well remember that when these questions were discussed, there was always somebody around to warn us of the moral collapse that would follow if everybody knew about and could procure safe contraception.Very often the same people would also caution us about how wholesale economic independence of women would threaten the existence of the family. My generation of young women at university or in the Armed Forces during the Second World War all heard these warnings. Our answer to the Cassandras, that is the answer of those of us who, like myself,regarded ourselves as high-minded feminists (of the old school), was that there was no moral value in behaving decently through fear.Better-educated women and women in the professions and satisfying jobs were likely, we thought, to have a greater sense of responsibility and better-grounded moral convictions than our poor subjected sisters whose morality we saw rather simplistically as being based largely on convention backed up by duress.

We also argued that the emancipation of women would affect men in a positive direction: they would be more likely to see women as equal companions in marriage rather than as mere objects of sexual satisfaction, mothers of their children, housekeepers and nurses.Marriage itself, we thought, had begun to assume a new content.Instead of being regarded as a ‘meal-ticket’ andstatus symbol for women or a source of sensual comforts for men, many people of both sexes began to view marriage essentially as a partnership of companions and equals.Even the ideal of romantic love, incipient for centuries, but which had overwhelmed the West from the nineteenth century onwards, became permeated witha new ideal of comradeship between men and women.

Whatever arcane discussions may have been conducted in the salons of such as the Bloomsbury Group4most people, including socialists, did not dream of questioning the traditional concept of sexual identity: that there are two sexes, male and female.Although we knew homosexuality existed the very word seemed to identify males as males and females as females: the word simply meant ‘same-sex sex’.The days of ‘polymorphous perversity’ were still far in the future.

The modern world becomes ‘post-modernist’

As the twentieth century draws to a close the Cassandras of myyouth wouldseem to have been vindicated. This is not the place to cite statistics showing the direct relationship between family breakdown and juvenile delinquency. These are readily available and show that there is cause for grave concern about social stability in all the democratic countries.5 The question at issue is whether these problems, which evidence profound moral and identity crises, are a consequence of the emancipation of women or whether the roots of that crisis are to be found in the same circumstances which brought about female emancipation.

If they are indeed interconnected and the inevitable accompaniment of modernization in any culture, then it is notthe West alone that faces such problems but also the rest of the world.On the other hand it may be that Western traditions before and during the process of modernization embody specific features conducive to the present crisis.How thevarious nations of the world with their very different histories and cultures are able to cope with these problems is perhaps one of the key questions to be posed as we enter the twenty-first century. If problems of identity and social cohesion deepen in some countries and are overcome in others it is not difficult to imagine which will grow stronger and which weaker.Perhaps Spengler6and Toynbee7may be proved correct in their deep pessimism about the future of the West.

Relativism and deconstruction

The most characteristic feature of the intellectual climate (in the Humanities as opposed to Science) in Western countries throughout most of this century has been the insistent rise of self-questioning and relativism in epistemology and ethics. At no other time or place in the history of civilizations has there been such voluminous criticism of its own traditions andinstitutionsas amongintellectuals in Western society over the last three hundred years. It would seem that this phenomenon arises directly out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the growth of democratic institutions and the habit of increasingly free discussion.

From the Renaissance onwards interrogation has grown in momentum, and in every area of human interest, to the point that we might call the twentieth century as much the century of total iconoclasm as of totalitarianism. Indeed it may well be that the former has more than a little to do with the latter. The situation contains its ironies, not least of which being that a procedure (rational criticism) which arose out of protest against dogma together withthe search for truth and greater knowledge has now culminated in what amounts to the denial of rationality and of objective knowledge.For this is indeed the characteristic of what is called post-modernism, a catch-all expression applied to a number of areas including art, literature, philosophy and the social sciences.

Deconstructionism, an influential trend in post-modernist philosophy, has as its basic tenetthat what we think of as knowledge is always suspect because it can only be reached through language and culture and these are not what they seem.They contain hidden meaning and require to be deconstructed, unbuilt, in order to reveal thepower relations that lie behind all discourse.In brief, there is no real world but only subjective interpretations of it. In all areas of life the holders of power impose their interpretations on the powerless in order the better to keep them in thrall.

These ideas, which have their source inmarxist doctrines, descend from the ‘sociologists of knowledge’ and find their apogee in the writings of people like Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida,Michel Foucault8 and Jean Lyotard.Foucault’s is thename of most significance here because his ideas have had considerable if not primordialinfluence on the development of ‘gender theory’.

Foucault’s favourite rejoinder to his critics was the question D’où parles-tu?Any objection was thus undermined, the implication being that the critic had a hidden interest in attempting to refute Foucault’s views. This kind of pseudo-refutation is common in unscientific theories such as Marxism and Freudianism which are couched in such terms as to render them unfalsifiable. The stance of relativists such as Foucault and others that there is no such thing as truth is, of course, very much like the classic paradox of the Cretan liar. If they are right, then they are wrong, forthey present their denial of truth as itself an absolute truth and they may thus be attacked from their own premises.D’où parles-tu? alsomay logically be turned on Foucault and his followers with the question D’où parlent-ils? However, to point this out, did not impress Foucault because despite his enormous (though often faulty) erudition he was contemptuous of rationality and regarded the Enlightenment as the initiator of those two perverse enemies of human well-being: logocentrism or, worse, phallogocentrism.

Logocentrism is the deconstructionists’ word for the belief that there exists a real world and that it can bedescribed in words. Phallogocentrism isthe word usedto describe what Foucault regarded as compulsory heterosexuality, yet another stratagemof the bourgeoisie to preserve its power.It is clear inthesewriters that the enemy to be struck down is western culture and all its traditions, including science and logic, seen as a kind of monstrous conspiracy to preserve capitalism. When pressed, deconstructionists will admit, even proclaim, that their position does in fact entail that ‘anything goes’.Your views are as good as mine; your behaviour as admissible as mine:there exist no standards and no moral values.All these things had been said by others long before Foucault.The source of his fascination for the radical generations that arose during and after May 1968 was the length to which he took his radicalism.From a critique of the concept of insanity to that of the prison system andcriminalityhe went on to a sure-fire winner with his Histoire de la Sexualité.9 Here the concept of sexual identity itself was challenged and declared to be a social construct.Heterosexuality, it was claimed, was not an essential component of human identity but had been imposed on society in the interests of those in power in order to force people (including members of the bourgeoisie themselves)to devote their energies to work.Precisely how people would feed, clothe and house themselves if they gave up work for a life dedicated to multi-sexual pleasure we are not told.

The conclusion seems inescapable that the adoption on an individual levelofrelativism as an intellectual and moral life style provides an excuse for mental laziness in the first case and self-indulgence in the second.As far as society as a whole is concerned the prevalence and propagation of cultural relativism tends to deprive many people, especially the young and vulnerable, of anchorage for their sense of identity and furthers anomie, rootlessness and irresponsibility.

This brief digression into the realm of philosophy is ofrelevance to the subject of‘gender theory’ because many of its main proponents claim the status of philosophers and regard Foucault as their inspiration. Deconstructionism has rapidly gained adepts in Humanities departments in universities all over the English-speaking world.This phenomenal success for bizarre theories which, at one time, could easily have been ‘deconstructed’ by a first-year Philosophy undergraduate, can surprise nobody familiar with the declining standards in education.There are no doubt other causes too, which reside in the narcissistic ethos prevalent in consumer societies and the irresistible appeal of what looks like an intellectual justification for unbridled pleasure-seeking.And so Foucault, the white, European male, became the guru and inspirer of ‘gender feminists’. In truth his ideas were tailor-made for them, providing a scholarly-sounding mantle for the proclamation of war against the concept of sexual identity. In the universities, at least, the war has had considerable success and the battle-fields have been in the social sciences andespecially Women’s Studies.

There is another, less scholarlyand more scientistic, strand in the tangled web of influences that have given rise to ‘gender theory’: the new discipline of sexology pioneered by Kraffte-Ebbing, Havelock Ellis, and Wilhelm Reich. Some of these were long-banned and available only to the medical profession. Alfred Charles Kinsey and his associates, however, in a time of relaxed censorship, burst upon the world in 1948 and 195310 with reports of supposedly scientific studies which were seized upon avidly by the media and became best-sellers.Still widely cited today, both Kinsey’s methods and his results have been subjected to serious criticism especially in connexion with the atypical subjects he interviewed: mainly students and members of prison populations. He has also been accused of sexual experimentation with infants and young children.11 evertheless, some of Kinsey’s conclusionsbecame widely accepted, especially his highly dubious figures regarding the incidence in the population of homosexuality—placed at more than ten percent when more recent and more serious studies conclude for one to two percent.12 Even more influential was Kinsey’s hypothesis of the fluidity of sexual identity and the existence of a continuumrather than a dichotomy.Kinsey may be regarded as the founding-father of a flourishing and lucrative industry, well-suited to the developing media ethos of sensationalism and the satisfaction of prurient curiosity.Much latoer and more serious studies in the field,13 which undermine what have become received perceptions, have aroused less publicity and are largely forgotten in the field of ‘gender studies’. Also influential in promoting the ‘anything goes’ sexual ethos were certain psycho-analytic practitioners such as Carl Rogers and his ‘Human Potential Movement’.

By 1993 Women’s Studies was‘by far the fastest-growing area within the humanities and social sciences, both institutionally and in terms of publications.It is estimated thatthere are now five hundred women’s studies programs, thirty thousand courses, and fifty feminist institutes…’ in the United States.14 Visitors to any academic book-shop may confirm for themselves the industrial quantities of titles that have been published in the field. What has come to be known in more recent years as ‘queer studies’ has also expanded, though to a lesser degree.Because its preoccupation appears mainly to bewith male homosexuality, by definition less concerned with the emancipation of women, this branch of‘gendertheory’ has not made the same inroads into public forums as ‘gender feminism’ which claims to speak for all women.The fraternal branch of ‘gender studies’ will therefore not be discussed here although the two share many basic ideas.

A word about words

The word ‘gender’ is now in common use in the English-speaking countries to refer to something other than the technical grammatical classification of nouns and adjectives.The new usage has become so widespread in the English-speaking world that to challenge it now sounds old-fashioned and idiosyncratic.However, the new sense represents a key concept in the Pandora’s box of ‘political correctness’and has almost everything to do with challenging the traditional (binary) concept of sexual identity.

One preliminary objection to the new usage, now employed throughout the social sciences and in the media,is that it is virtually untranslatable and there is something very odd about a concept that cannot be expressed inlanguages other than English.Even for those who know only English a moment’s reflexion will demonstrate how peculiar is the recent innovation. Its inappropriateness is clear when we try to employ it with reference to reproduction. All reproduction in the animal world (with the occasional exception of lowly creatures like gastropods and certain reptiles) from insect-life upwards is sexual reproduction, i.e. through the union of male and female. This is a biological given, not a social construct.Biologists, botanists, zoologists, ethnologists and so on habitually talk about ‘sexual reproduction’ and regard it as the means whereby diversity of inheritance and the survival capacities of a species are ensured.They are not referring to erotic activity.

The insistence of some English-speakers on the use of the word ‘gender’ has indeed given rise to considerable difficulties in international forums and an illuminating example of this will be discussed below. This is because languages that do possess grammatical gender—and these are most ofthe European languages except English and Dutch—also use the word ‘gender’ in a variety of different ways none of which refer to the sex of human beings:First: genus, family, race kind. Second: kind, manner, sort, way. Third: artistic style, manner. Fourth: manners, fashion, taste.15

‘Gender theory’, let it be clear,refers tothe cluster of ideas which attack in no uncertain terms the traditional concept of sexual identity. ‘Gender theorists’ are thought of as radical feminists and sometimes style themselves as such although there are various factions in the movement whose quibbles need not concern us.However, ‘gender feminism’, as will be seen, is not in fact the culmination of the movement for women’s emancipation: it is rathera programme for the abolition of women and of men, an aim explicitly stated by some of its proponents

‘Gender theory’ in words

For the sake of clarification ‘gender theorists’ must be allowed to speak for themselves. The authors quoted below are not marginal butexemplify ‘gender theory’.Most of the publicationsfrom which they are taken are to be found in course material in Women’s Studies departments and some of the authors are leading figures in the radical feminist movement.

Although many people think that men and women are the natural expression of genetic blueprint, gender is a product of human thought and culture, a social construction that creates the ‘true nature ‘ of all individuals.16

Heterosexuality has been both forcibly and subliminally imposed on women…’Compulsory heterosexuality’ was named as one of the ‘crimes against women’ by the Brussels International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in 1976.17

An appropriate workable abortion-rights strategy is to inform all women that heterosexual penetration is rape, whatever their subjective experience to the contrary.18

…heterosexuality, like motherhood, needs to be recognized and studied as a political institution19

Gender fluidity is the ability to freely and knowingly become one or many of a limitless number of genders, for any length of time, at any rate of change. Gender fluidity recognizes no borders or rules ofgender20

Women couldn’t be oppressed if there was no such thing as ‘women’. Doing away with gender is key to the doing away with patriarchy.21

Imagine that the sexes have multiplied beyond currently imaginable limits. It would have to be a world of shared powers.Patient and physician, parent and child, male and female, heterosexual and homosexual—all those oppositions and others would have to be dissolved as sources of division. A new ethic of medical treatment would arise, one that would permit ambiguity in a culture that had overcome sexual division.22

Imagine sex among friends as the norm. Imagine valuing genital interaction in terms of whether and how it fosters friendship and pleasure… Pleasure is our birthright of which we have been robbed in religious patriarchy… I picture friends, not families, basking in the pleasure we deserve because our bodies are holy.23

Gay/lesbian culture can also be looked on as a subversive force that can challenge the hegemonic nature of the idea of the family.It can, however, be done in a way that people do not feel is in opposition to the family per se,a simple ‘smash the family’ slogan is seen as a threat not so much to the ruling class as to people in the working class who often rely on family ties to maintain security and stability in their lives. In order for the subversive nature of gay culture to be used effectively, we have to be able to present alternative ways of looking at human relationships.24

One of the most influential of the ‘gender theorists’is Judith Butler.She is Professor of Humanities at the JohnsHopkinsUniversity and is listed as a director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC).The commission is a UN accredited NGO and sponsor of the international petition campaign ‘Put Sexuality on the Agenda of the World Conference on Women’ The petition called on member states to recognize ‘the right to determine one’s sexual identity; the right to control one’s own body, particularly in establishing intimate relations, and the right to choose if, when and with whom to bear or raise children as fundamental components of the human rights of all women regardless of sexual orientation’.25

Butler’s book, Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identityis widely cited in ‘Women’s Studies’ course material. the right to determine one’s sexual identity; the right to control one’s own body, particularly in establishing intimate relations, and the right to choose if, when and with whom to bear or raise children as fundamental

Assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of ‘men’ will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that ‘women’ will interpret only female bodies. Further, even if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their morphology and constitution (which will become a question) there is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two. The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relations of gender to sex whereby gendermirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it. When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and femininea male body as a female one. 26

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequences that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.27

Shulamith Firestone, another prestigious ‘gender theoretician’, is also one of the most explicitly Marxist andcomprehensive. The Vintage Book of Feminism declares Firestone’s book The Dialectic of Sex (dedicated to Simone de Beauvoir) ‘to have been a powerful force in shaping the ideas of radicals in the women’s movement—Robin Morgan considered it ‘a basic building block’ of feminism that had been crucial to the development of her thinking.’28

For a foretaste of the ‘gender’ utopia it is worth giving her writing some attention.

Natural reproductive differences between the sexes led directly to the first division of labor based on sex, which is at the origins of all further division into economic and cultural classes.29

So that just as to assureelimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underclass (the proletariat) and, in a temporary dictatorship, their seizure of the means of production, so to assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of reproduction: the restoration to women of ownership of their own bodies, as well as feminine control of human fertility, including both the new technology and all the social institutions of childbearing and childrearing. And just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself; genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.30

Thus, the ‘natural’ is not necessarily a ‘human’ value. Humanity has begun to outgrow nature, we can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on the grounds of its origins in Nature. Indeed, for pragmatic reasons alone it is beginning to look as if we must get rid of it.31

The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction; children would be born to both sexes equally, or independently of either, however, one chooses to look at it.’32

The incest taboo is now necessary only in order to preserve the family; then if we did away with the family we would in effect be doing away with the repressions that mold sexuality into specific formations. All other things being equal, people might still prefer those of the opposite sex simply because it is physically more convenient.33

If early sexual repression is the basic mechanism by which character structures supporting political, ideological, and economic serfdom are produced, an end to the incest taboo, through the abolition of the family, could have profound effects.Sexuality would be released from its straitjacket to eroticise our whole culture, changing its very definitions.34

We must include theoppression of children in any program of feminist revolution… Our final step must be the elimination of the very conditions of femininity and childhood.35

Adult/child and homosexual sex taboos would disappear, as well as nonsexual friendship…. All close relationships would include the physical.36

Among Firestone’sfirst demands forany alternative system are :

The freeing of women from the tyranny of their reproductive biology by every means available, and the diffusion of the childbearingand childrearing role to the society as a whole, men as well as women…4. The freedom of all women and children to do whatever they wish to do sexually…Child sexuality had to be repressed because it was a threat to the precarious internal balance of the family. These sexual repressions increased proportionately to the degree of cultural exaggeration of the biological family.… In our new society, humanity could finally revert to its natural ‘polymorphously perverse’ sexuality—all forms of sexuality would beallowed and indulged….marriage in its very definition will never be able to fulfil the needs of its participants, for it was organized around, and reinforces, a fundamentally oppressive biological condition that we only now have the skill tocorrect. As long as we have the institution we shall have the oppressive conditions at its base. We need to start talking about new alternatives that will satisfy the emotional and psychological needs that marriage, archaic as it is, still satisfies, but that will satisfy them better.’37

The foregoing quotations clearly show that ‘gender theory’ holds that it is the hegemony of men which compelswomen to be heterosexual. Indeed some gender-feminists go so far as to declare that without this compulsion lesbianism wouldbe preferred. Others, like Firestone, also favour pedophilia and incest. Some want ‘lesbianization of the world’ (Monique Wittig as cited by Butler).Others want sex with anybody at all, singly or in groups.What is truly preposterous about these scabrous pronouncements is that their saturnalian (or better, satanic) fantasies have found a firm niche in formerly respectable quarters.Humanities undergraduates, instead of learning something of the great cultural heritage of civilization are instead being taught to despise what they do not know and indoctrinated with something more akin to pornographic science-fiction.

Gender-theory in action

‘Gender theory’ should not be dismissed as beingall talk.Not only doesit occupy an important place in Women’s Studies and Humanities departments, it has also become an issue in international organizations. An example of the way ‘gender theorists’ operate was provided by the discussionsduring the preparations for and in the course of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held in the Chinese capital inSeptember 1995.38

Among the Beijing participants discussion of the word ‘gender’ in the documentsaroused considerable controversy between, on the one hand, some English-speaking delegates and, on the other, representatives of that benighted majority of the world’s women for whom English is not the mother-tongue. These had at first innocentlyassumed that the word ‘gender’ was indeed being used as a euphemism for the word‘sex’ and that ‘gender’ referred to male and female human beings. However,there was no optionin the translations butto use the respective languages’ word for ‘sex’.

The controversy that ensued revealed the pitfalls that beset meetings where well-meaning innocence confronts malevolent ignorance.However, in the course of proceedings it became explicit that the use of this unfamiliar concept was a ploy intended to smuggle into documents the UN-blessed recognition by women’s organizations world-wide of a number of ‘rights’ usually rejected as immoral by pro-family women’s organizations. These rights included those ofhomosexuality to be regarded as equal to heterosexuality; total freedom and assistance for abortion; sex for adolescents; prostitution as a service industry as well as the adoption by governments of quotas for women in all areas of public life.

Unfortunately for ‘gender feminists’ there were English-speakers present from pro-family organizations who were familiar with the take-over of Women’s Studies programs in US universities. In consequence, fierce polemics ensued in the course of whichthe ‘gender perspective’ was exposed. Comparison between the different texts was elucidative: although ‘gender’ appeared over 60 times in the Feb 27, 1975, English draft, the equivalent words genero andgenre were never used in the Spanish or French versions. Instead ‘gender’ was translated as sexo (sex) or hombres y mujeres (men and women) or with some other phrase. In some cases the English, French and Spanish each had a different meaning.

So it seems that there is something peculiarly anglo-centric about ‘gender’.Its critics were ferociously attacked by the ‘gender’ feminists who saw this as a reactionary onslaught on ‘political correctness’.Former US congresswoman Bella Abzug spoke for the ‘gender feminists’ and her claims were revealing:

The concept ofgender is embedded in contemporary social, political and legal discourse. ….The meaning of the word gender has evolved as differentiated from the word sex to express the reality that women’s and men’s roles and status are socially constructed and subject to change…

The current attempt by several Member States to expunge the word gender from the Platform for Action and to replace it with the word sex is an insulting and demeaning attempt to reverse the gains made by women, to intimidate us, and to block further progress. We urge the small number of male and female delegates seeking to side-track and sabotage the empowerment of women to cease this diversionary tactic.They will not succeed. They will only waste precious time. We will not go back to subordinate inferior roles.39

Because the ‘gender feminists’ were better prepared and better funded,their unrepresentative ideas, although they were forced to be toned down, did in fact find their way into the final Beijing documents.This was no new phenomenon.The ‘gender perspective’ is to be encountered in a multitude of other UN materials as well as that of western government departments,those of the European Union and of the European Parliament.

Social conditioning and sexual identity

Rejection of relativism does not entail underestimation of the importance of social conditioning in the formation of identity.Simone de Beauvoir is famous for her oft-quoted remark that one is not born a woman but rather becomes one. This rather trivial observation has been granted far more weight than it deserved.In one sense it contains a banal truth. In another it contains a falsehood. Everybody is born male or female.The kind of men or women they become will, of course, be influenced by the way they are socialized. The experience and education of a child within its culture and the expectations it encounters are of great importance in forming its identity and character. Interaction between the innate and the culturally-shaped have long been discussed in the ‘nature versus nurture’ controversy in connexion with intelligence and other qualities.In the matter of sexual identity there is an added aspect and biological function may in a very primary sense influence the way an individual is socialized.If the survival conditions of a given society require females to be protected and dependent upon men, the culture will see to it that members of each sexare socialized accordingly. Experience will provide the growing human with many of the elements that enable it to construct its identity. The process is essentially an interactive one.

It seems to me of considerable importance that we are not born as selves, but that we have to learn that we are selves; in fact we have to learn to be selves40 bein self is partly the result of inborn dispositions and partly the result of experience, especially social experience. The new-born child has many inborn ways of acting and of responding, and many inborn tendencies to develop new responses and new activities. Among these tendencies is a tendency to develop into a person conscious of himself. But in order to achieve this, much must happen. A human child growing up in social isolation will fail to attain a full consciousness of self 41 …All learned adaptation has a genetic basis in the sense that the heredity of the organism (its ‘genome’) must provide for the aptitude of acquiring new adaptations.42

In traditional societies, in modernizing ones and in our own day the cultural elements that contribute to the child’s consciousness of selfhood, have varied.It can be argued that only with women’s emancipation and the material possibilities offull participationin socialand public life is the girl-child able to achieve full realization of self.The boy-child’s consciousness of identity is also subject to change.Sometimes nowadays for the worse.Instead of the male ideal evolving from the role of protector-dominator of women towards that of equal partner and companion, too many features of our culture are helping to produce boy-children who will turn into irresponsible aggressors.If ‘gender-theory’ gains in influence, as it aims to, it will also have a negative effect on the sense of identity of young women.The socialization (‘consciousness-raising’) engaged in by women’s studies aims at producing females who see themselves as victims of men, as ‘gender-fluid’ creatures hostile to the family and with their inborn vocation for motherhood suppressed. The damaging effects on the personalities of impressionable young girls caused by this kind of brain-washing are easy to predict. However, there are considerable difficulties for the success of such projects. The genetic predisposition of females—the essential basis of their identity—for motherhood and child-rearing are much stronger than the genetic predispositions of males for fatherhood.The latter need more positive socialization in order to become mature citizens.‘Gender-feminists’ find it very difficult to convert ordinary women into changing their natural propensities.This is why they resort, as in the end do all revolutionaries, to administrative means to gain their ends, as we have seen with the Beijing case.

‘Gender feminists’ are also notable fortheir demagogy. To win support among vulnerable young women, as well as grossly distorting history they campaign against ‘sexual harassment’ and have extended the meaning of this expression beyond all reasonable bounds.The main effect of these campaigns is to cause women to feel more insecure (the victim cult) and to provoke in many young men more irresponsible behaviour than ever.To bolster these campaigns and other accusations of ‘patriarchal oppression’, many leading ‘gender theorists’ have had recourse to the ‘cooking’ of statistics over a wide field.Christina Hoff Summers has produced an impressive array of examples of this practice.41 Another demagogic ploy has been the demand for quotas or affirmative action which, if put into effect, can only damage the credibility of competent women and further irritate relations between men and women.A ‘hidden agenda’ that may well lie behind this demand will be suggested below.

Ethnicity and ‘gender’

‘Gay and Lesbian’ activist groups including ‘gender feminists’ make frequent declarations about ‘minority rights’ and tend to seek allieswith activists among those ethnic groups which see themselves as disadvantaged. To maintain that anything significant other than physical features isbiologically innate about race is generally regarded as redolent of racism. The desire of‘gender’ theorists’ to make common cause with certain kinds of nationalism clearly owes itself to the subjacent intention ofdrawing parallels between ‘gender’ and ethnicity.Because there is a vast plurality of ethnic groups, why not a vast plurality of‘genders’?Because ethnicity is often fluid,why not ‘gender’?Because nationalist protest and revolt are frequently against real oppression or discrimination, if ‘gender’ activists associate with them they too can be seen as victims. To insist on the essential nature of sexual identity is to be ‘sexist’ and that is bad, as it is bad to be a ‘racist’. This is an old story in the history of protest movements, especially the spurious ones.They amalgamate issues in order to confuse them.

Deconstructing the deconstructors

The final question to be answered is why I have chosen ‘gender theory’ and ‘gender feminists’ as my main concern in these pages and have said very little about contemporary challenges to male identity. The reason has to do with thatessence of female identity, whichclearly ‘gender feminists’ are very well aware of.When they propose not just affirmative action and parity for women in all areas of social life, but even amendments to the US Constitution to provide for two senators from each sex for each State of the Union, ‘gender feminists’ know what they are doing. Their aim is to obtain a captiveconstituency. They know only too well—they have discussed it often enough in their proposals for the virtual abolition of motherhood—that the majority of women, whether they work outside the home or not, have neither time nor inclination for positions ofpublic power and are unlikely to want to give up motherhood and family life for the often shabby rewards of politics.Some lesbians may be mothers; most are not.This gives homosexual women a considerable edge over the generality of heterosexual women both in the labour and political market-place—an advantage that homosexual men do not enjoy with regard to heterosexual men.Nor can homosexual men aspire to lead grassroots men’s emancipation movements, did such exist.

Lesbian women, however, claim to speak for all women andto represent them in positions of power.Their quota, parity and similar proposals, if put into effect, would inevitably help them realize this ambition.It can be argued that ‘gender feminists’ have a strategy of achieving power on the backs of ordinary women, in the same way as Bolshevik middle-class intellectuals rose to power in Russia on the backs of the proletariat.And all in the name of the struggle against the powerful.Perhaps Foucault’s question needs to be reformulated:D’où parlent-elles? What are these unrepresentative women’s hidden interests?Many already proclaim their aim of overthrowing existing society.Who then will be Big Sister?

Although ‘queer theorists’ share with their female counterparts, general deconstructionist approaches there arecrucial contradictions between them. The latter, as we have seen, insist on the primacy of social construction of sexual identity and would undermine or even go so far as trying to destroy its biological foundation.Many male homosexual spokesmen, however, are now beginning, as part of their demand for recognition of minority status, to insist on the importance of innate factors.‘Gender feminism’ is unremitting in its hostility to marriage and the family.Many male homosexuals are asking for these institutions to be available to them.Discussion of such questions is beyond the scope of this paper.Except for one comment: the so-called ‘Gay and Lesbian’ alliance seems to be as basically incoherent and unstable as any alliance of these two with ethnic minority activism.

Conclusion

The replacement of the word ‘sex’ by the word ‘gender’ seems to be yet one more example of an old technique: what Orwell called Newspeak or Françoise Thomlangue de bois. Give something another name and you obscure its true nature. Get people to use it and you have brain-washed them.As with ‘people’s democracy’ or‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, if you repeat an expression often enough and persuade people to use it, many of them end up accepting that it describes a real state of affairs.Here, in truth, reside power interests behind the use of words.

To use the word ‘gender’ instead of ‘sex’, no matter how innocently, is to give implicit credit to the new word’shidden meanings:the suggestion that sexual identity is fluid; that there may be more than two ‘genders’;that people make ‘gender’ options. What ‘gender theory’ denies is that in the real world there exist only two sexes, male and female andthe norm is for humans, like animals, to seek and prefer erotic relations with individuals of the opposite sex. In other words, mothers are women and fathers are men and parenting is most successful within a family structure. The very small minority which prefers necessarily sterile carnal union with members of their own sex still remain either biologically male or female with the potential of being fathers or mothers. The existence of a negligible number of unfortunates born with genital malformations who are physiologically pseudo-hermaphrodites ‘doesn’t prove that heterosexuality is not natural, any more than the fact that some babies are born blind proves that it isn’t natural for human beings to see’.44

In concluding this appraisal of‘Gender as Identity’ I would like to quote from the last page of Dale O’Leary’s analysis of the Beijing meeting.It is a succinct and timely statement which should be pondered by everybody concerned with the human sciences and the clarification of identity questions in the area of sex:

The feminists have relied on the politeness of men. They have demanded that dangerous nonsense and utter stupidity be treated with respect. The Gender Agenda cannot be defeated until people are willing to stand up and say, ‘No more inclusive language, no more politically correct speech.’ We must refuse to say ‘gender’ when we mean ‘sex’. Those who are offended by reality and human nature will just have to live with it 45

Notes

1. Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York,1986).

2. Norman Davies, Europe A History, (Oxford, 1996), p. 716.

3. Ibid., p.717.

4. The London literary circle known as the Bloomsbury Group, several of whose members were homosexual, frequently questioned sexual identity.See especially Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a novel about a trans-sexual figure reincarnated over four centuries.

7. Arnold Joseph Toynbee, A Study of History (abbreviated version, London 1946).

8. Foroverviews see J.G. Merquior, Foucault (London, 1985) and Roger Scruton Thinkers of the New Left (London, 1985), pp.31-44.Scruton’s Modern Philosophy (London1994) deals in several places with Post-modernism, Deconstructionism and Michel Foucault.

Arquivo do blog

AIMS AND PURPOSES

Patrícia Lança has other blogs, Portolani and Portolani Special,which publish material on a variety of subjects. This blog, howeverwill be devoted exclusively to themes related to Gender Politics and the Culture Wars. Serious comments are welcome but will be moderated in order to avoid the kind of nonsense and vulgarity, which inevitably arise when these subjects are mentioned.

STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLES

The author, a feminist of the old school, subscribes to the principles of classical liberalism and does not favour criminalization or prohibition of any behaviour that does not harm other people. Liberals believe that individuals are free to pursue their own life-styles, provided they do not interfere with those of others. Liberals can never condone attempts to silence the free expression of opinion in appropriate forums on any grounds whatsoever. This freedom does not, of course, apply to private spaces, which is why comments here will be moderated. Those who feel unfairly restricted possess the freedom to institute their own blogs or websites where they can freely give reign to whatever Google or the relevant server does not prohibit.

Portolani Redux aims to restore some rationality and balance to the discussion of subjects which, despite the hilarity they arouse in the frivolous, have become increasingly important in the last two or three decades. Restoring rationality in this area involves exposing and criticizing attempts at censorship in the name of spurious claims to protect minorities. In a free society nobody can be above criticism or demand undue privilege and immunity. Good manners cannot be legislated into existence and can only become generalized by practice and example.

Where there is discrimination against individuals to prevent them from exercising their legimate rights, this should be denounced. What should also be discussed is what these rights are and whether they need to be extended.

Accordingly this space will discuss such controversial questions as legislation about and provision for abortion, adoption rights, marriage entitlement, family breakdown and the European demographic crisis.

INVITATION

Serious contributions to this discussion, beyond the normal size of a comment, are welcome. They may be sent to the author by e-mail to be considered for publication as normal posts subject to comment. Limit to number of words: 750 words. Language: English, Portuguese, Spanish or French. Relevant links and references to books and publications are also welcome.E-mail: patamar@lanca.org

LINK LIST

OTHER SITES

Visit other Portolani sites:Portolani, Portolani Special and Portolani Books (still under construction). The owner of these sites also writes, together with a distinguished team of bloggers, for O Insurgente.